Chapter Text
He followed the water.
It was the only thing that kept him alive and kept him himself. He could lap at it like an animal when his throat grew so dry he feared it would bleed, dip his face in it when the unyielding desert air grew too hot, splash it on himself to wash off the dirt and the sand, to remind himself that he was a lord, not some Vorox who bathed by rolling in the abrasive sand.
Others like him, animal and Agori alike, came to the stream for the same reasons, and that was an opportunity as well. Agori, he could cut down while they bent to drink and loot their bodies for food and equipment. Animals were far more palatable sustenance than wretched Thornax.
One day, he watched the stream widen before his eyes. It was far from a mighty river, but it had a current now, an undeniable tug on his ankles.
After that, he began meeting the others. Strange creatures, a joining of machine and flesh. The Great Beings’ work, he knew at once, but not like them, nothing like…
He did not kill them on sight as he did the Agori. Any Agori would do the same to him if they were capable of it, but these half-machines did not always know who or what he was. Some of them welcomed him warmly, with the innocence of a child exploring a brand new place. They were useful to him, often, before they died.
These beings told such fantastic stories. They claimed that his rival, the one who had driven him out, was their wayward god. That he had come into his power once more and undone what had happened to their world. That he had restored Spherus Magna to what it had been.
It was impossible, of course. The one he had fought was a man, not a god. A strong man, and a worthy adversary, but a man nonetheless. A man cannot move the world he lives in around as if it were a child’s toy.
It was too tempting to believe. If his opponent had been a god, not a mere Glatorian, then his defeat was excusable. Acceptable. He would not allow himself that excuse.
There was a more insidious temptation in those stories as well. One that he refused to name. He bit down on his tongue to suppress it until the iron taste of blood filled his mouth.
If Spherus Magna has been restored…
His jaw clenched, and pain erupted again, refocusing his wandering mind.
Drink from the desert stream. Choke down rancid Thornax. Fill your mouth with sand to dull the hunger pangs when there is no Thornax. Sleep in the day, buried beneath a layer of sand to keep hidden and cool. Move only in the dark of night.
Watch that rock carefully, there’s no trail in the sand behind it where the wind moved it. It could be one of them, lying in wait. Watching you.
Such small moments defined the life of a wanderer in the wastes. Tiny successes, tiny failures, existence hinged on them.
He lost track of days. They no longer held any meaning. He lived and died a hundred lifetimes, a thousand in the wastes, until the time he had spent as a leader to his people felt like a mere instant compared to the time he had spent here, an exile. No home, no people.
Sometimes, he swore he saw his own footsteps spiraling around him out into the distance, as if he had been walking in circles for years. Or was he going mad?
Humiliation. This is humiliation.
No.
Death would be humiliation. He was a survivor. The uncaring universe had been especially callous with him, and he lived yet.
Tuma, once and future emperor of the Skrall, rose from where he had fallen to his knees in the shifting sand, and he pushed his exhausted body forward.
His destination? Ahead. Always ahead. Keep moving at all costs. Or the buzzards will have your flesh.
There was a figure, black as starless night, on the horizon. It was kneeling over the stream, lapping without hands, in the manner Tuma had been reduced to countless times.
Tuma tightened his grip on his sword. Its edge had been blunted from a hundred quick, messy duels across the dunes. But it would still cut whatever he asked it to.
He crept silently through howling gusts of sand, the vista of stars and nebulae and midnight blue sky above him making him feel small enough to be invisible to this interloper.
Jerkily, it unfolded its body to a standing position and looked straight at him, scarlet eyes flashing. Tuma’s breath fled from him.
Father?
No. Impossible.
Still, he broke into a sprint. It was not his father, no, but it was a fellow daharna, a leader! He had been certain they were all gone. But there, along its legs were the scarified runes of his people. And on its back, the spare blades they began to wear when they took their first command!
Here was an ally. One who would hear his tale, who would lend him his support, would help him take back the empire that was his.
I am not alone.
Tuma drew close enough to make out the daharna’s features, and instantly skidded to a stop in the loose sand.
Something was very wrong.
It was not his father, though he saw now why he had thought there was a resemblance. It had been so long since he had looked at his own reflection, it was not the way of the Skrall to care about personal appearance.
Tuma did not realize until right then how closely he had come to resemble his father.
And yet…
The other daharna was him, and yet was not him. Its posture was wrong, slouched forward where Tuma stood straight as a pike. It held the muscles of his jaw too loose. But strangest of all was its armor.
Lord of Rock, its armor.
It was fused to the apparition’s flesh as if it had fallen into a lava floe in full plate. He could not tell where flesh ended and where metal began. Even this creature’s version of his sword was a fleshy outgrowth of its hand.
Tuma could hear nothing but the rushing of blood in his ears as he leveled his sword at his twisted double.
Then it smiled, something Tuma had not done since he was a child. And in the blink of an eye it transformed into a bird and flew away.
Tuma cursed and swiped at it with his blade, but it flitted below the strike and vanished into a cloud of sand.
His breath was gone, his heart frozen in his chest, as he spun in circles on the desert floor, swinging at shadows. He saw flashes in the corner of his eye. Blades that gleamed in the torchlight, cold mechanical eyes.
Silent death had come for him at last.
Stronius had coined the name. Baterra. There was none more appropriate. What they had done to his people…
Everything Tuma had done had been to defy them. To deny them the Skrall blood they seemed to crave. To survive.
He would do what he had to do to survive even now.
“Flee or die, shapeshifter!” Tuma roared.
It would not answer. He did not think they even heard.
They had not heard his pleas for mercy, all those years ago.
A hissing, cracking voice echoed across the empty dunes.
“You are not welcome in my domain, Skrall.”
Tuma chortled, shifting the hilt of his sword in his hands. Remarkably, he felt a surge of relief. An enemy he did not know was better than one he knew would be his doom.
“You are not one of them,” he laughed. “You warned me with your own voice. The enemy speaks only when it wears the face of another.”
His grip tightened, his breathing slowed. His voice was quieter when he spoke again.
“It wore the face of my father when it came to me.”
There was a deranged cackle over his left shoulder, and he pivoted, stabbing at it with a snarl. A twisted, shapeless thing danced through the shadows, just out of reach.
“You claim the right to be cruel because cruelty was visited on you? Spare me. I have met countless tyrants just like you.”
Tuma growled, keen eyes scanning the empty landscape for any sign of movement.
“I did what I had to do.”
“For your ambition.”
“For my people!”
“You chose power.”
“I chose survival.”
“You were brutal.”
“I was necessary!”
Tuma forced himself to slow his breathing, to listen to the desert around him. Beneath the chirping of insects, the whistling of wind… He could almost hear it, couldn’t he? Talons scraping along the sand?
“Tell me, beast,” he murmured. “What would you have done? Baterra in the mountains to the north, distrustful Glatorian to the south? What would you have done?”
There! The scraping was close now. The creature was trying to set up an ambush. Like lightning, he struck, spinning around and unleashing a powerful overhand stroke that drove his almost-double backwards.
“I chose the path forward that preserved our culture, the bloodlines of old Spherus Magna!”
Sword rang against sword, reverberating across the empty night. The creature that had taken his shape fought just like him as well. Aggressive, leaving nothing in reserve.
But Tuma had learned through bitter defeat that even he had weaknesses which could be exploited. The shifter had his skill, but not his experience.
If one could only endure Tuma’s relentless aggression, he would tire himself out and be helpless against their retribution.
And so Tuma wore his strange rival down, parrying and dodging ferocious blows he knew all too well.
“And yes, in so doing, I became the greatest leader the Skrall have ever known! I alone survived the baterra when my fellow daharna fell. I united the Skrall beneath one banner, something no Skrall had done since the Lord of Rock!”
The shapeshifter stumbled, barely keeping its blade in a guard high enough to deflect Tuma’s next wicked strike.
“I taught my people to play the Agori’s foolish arena game, and to beat them at it! I conquered Atero! I burned Tajun to cinders!
Another overwhelming blow drove Tuma’s double to its knees. He drew his sword back to take off its head.
“I accomplished more for the Skrall than my father and his father before him could have ever dreamed!”
The creature glared up at Tuma with his own eyes. When it spoke, it was in perfect imitation of Tuma’s own clipped, sonorous tone, not the eerie whisper it had used before.
“And you failed!”
With a monumental and wholly unexpected effort, Tuma halted his swing.
He stood, panting, the shapeshifter’s life in his hands. His blade pressed against the hide of its neck just below the jaw, drawing a single drop of bright blue blood.
“I failed…” Tuma echoed.
He dropped the blade to the desert sand.
He stared at the thing that was wearing his own face. A cheap mockery of it, more like. Was that how the people of this world saw him? A being who was slowly becoming his armor, who could no longer take it off? Who had forgotten where war ends and where life begins?
The shapeshifter smirked and in the blink of an eye, it swelled in size, growing until it towered above Tuma as an amphibious creature with mantis-like forelimbs.
It was biomechanical, like the visitors, like the thing’s attempt at imitating Tuma had been. That clenched it. This shapeshifting monster was one of them as well, of a type Tuma had not yet encountered.
Before Tuma could act, one of those forelimbs snapped straight in the blink of an eye, and the thing’s fist connected with his chest. It snatched the air from his chest and sent him flying until he crashed into a sand dune hard enough to bury his head into it.
Shuddering, heart pounding, he pulled himself free in time to see the beast shift itself into a patchwork creature that looked like several of the tall biomechs, the Toa, mashed together. It launched jets of liquid crystal from the mismatched weapons it held in its six arms. They solidified when they struck Tuma’s legs, binding them together and thwarting his attempts to rise.
“You are a failure, Tuma. Why are you still here? Why do you fight to survive?”
“To rebuild my empire,” said Tuma without hesitation.
The six-armed Toa was gone, and in its place was some kind of serpent as tall as a Skrall. It darted for Tuma and coiled around him, binding his arms to his sides. It squeezed, constricting until Tuma could no longer draw a breath.
The thing’s head slithered up to his ear and spoke in that infernal whisper once more.
“Your empire? Don’t make me laugh. The weak flock to Stronius now. The strong forge a new path. They have cast their lot with the Dark Hunters, the Barraki, even thrown themselves on New Atero’s mercy. Your empire is dust, Tuma. It will never be yours again. So tell me, why are you still here?”
“Revenge,” Tuma wheezed with what little air he could muster.
“Revenge! Good! Against who?”
“The baterra! The Agori! Stronius! Metus! Mata Nui!”
“So, everyone you have ever met? Very well, burn this world for your revenge, and when you are ankle deep in ash and blood, I will still be here, asking you the same question! Why are you alive, Tuma?”
“I don’t know…”
“Unacceptable. Why?”
“I don’t know!”
“Why?”
The pressure of the serpent’s coils threatened to crush his chest. His heart pounded with mortal terror and he clawed at the creature to escape it, filled with a frenzied need to survive, though he still could not articulate why.
Why should you survive? Cut off from your home twice, so certain that you had to turn your back on everything you knew that you built an empire you knew could not stand. Why keep fighting? Why live?
“Because I am the last!”
The creature released him and Tuma crashed down to the sand, taking deep, rasping breaths.
“I am the last of my kind,” he managed. “I must live. I do not know how to die. I should have died out here already… No, I should have died with my father. With the rest of my people.”
There was silence. Tuma could not hear the creature breathing, could not hear it moving around. He did not look, but he continued.
“It came to me as my father. It said there was to be a war council in the Western canyon. It lured us all in that way… With the faces of ones we loved, or respected.
“And then they snuffed the torches. I’d… I’d never seen anything move so fast. In the darkness, in the noise, my… father’s hand slipped from mine.
“Five thousand Skrall would have killed and died at my father’s pleasure. Five thousand, shapeshifter, can you even imagine? I watched him break boulders in the mountains of our old home with one strike of his hand.
“I do not know how I escaped, how I lived. Only that I could not die. And that I was the only one.”
Limbs wrapped around Tuma from behind. This time, they did not crush. They were almost gentle.
Something told him that the creature was in its true form. Something told him he did not want to see it.
“I am the last as well,” the roughness of the voice tingled against his ear. “And yet I rose above you.”
A dam burst.
In a blind rage, Tuma spun around to face the hateful thing, and saw only barren, lifeless desert.
His world was fire and sulfur, the fury of a thousand battles at once. He had to move, he had to feel the life drain from something in his hands just to remind himself that he could do it.
He saw a flicker of movement and bolted towards it. The creature must have freed his legs from the crystal, and so he ran.
His usual caution was forgotten. He left the stream, his lifeline for the entirety of his long ordeal, behind him. His sword, he realized far too late, was still lying on the ground. Heedless, he trampled over rocks that could have been hidden baterra, weaved around animal carcasses that could have fed him for months.
And then he saw it, and his legs churned all the more furiously. The creature was gliding across the sand ahead of him, its indistinct bipedal form robed in silhouette. The incessant, mocking laugh drifted back to him like the memory of a breeze.
With one hand on the thing's throat, he would silence that laugh once and for all.
Night became day, and day night again, but he did not end his pursuit. At one point, the laughing monster shifted into a little rodent-like form that bounded along the plains, but Tuma ran even faster.
He ran until his legs blazed with agony and then went numb, until his footprints were bloody and the soles of his feet ragged, until his face was chafed by the dry wind and sand billows, until there was nothing echoing in his mind but the laugh, the shapeshifter's mirth at his very existence.
Night and day, day and night. Night and day, day and night, and day.
Until the shapeshifter vanished into the morning mist, as if he had been chasing a mirage.
Tuma fell headlong and was as still as death. It all hit him at the same time. The hunger that twisted his guts around until he feared they would burst, the thirst, the agonizing, inescapable dryness of his mouth and his throat. His shins, which felt as though they had cracked in half.
He was burned, bleeding, starving, exhausted.
And still a failure.
He would die here, at last. There seemed to be no way around it. He would never find his way back to the stream that had preserved him for so long, and now he had no energy to hunt. He didn’t even have the energy to move. The shapeshifter had played him perfectly, to lead him to his doom.
It was long overdue. And this, he supposed, was as good a death as any. Quiet and peaceful, his body unmarked, lying on his face in the cool grass.
A better death than he deserved.
Grass?
Though it took all of his strength, Tuma sat bolt upright.
The dying saw things that were not there, this was known to the Skrall. Tuma had seen it himself countless times. He had made it happen countless times. Delirious ramblings as their blood drained, starving their brains. References to people long dead, to faraway places.
Tuma never imagined he would experience it himself.
He was lying in a valley made verdant by the shadow of twin mountains. A waterfall tumbled down the mountainside into a pool as clear as a mirror. His eyes were bombarded by flowers in brilliant reds, yellows, purples. Colors he has not seen since they were torn away from him and replaced by the endless, flat monotony of brown and tan.
He had forgotten that plants could be colors other than brown and green.
Movement caught his attention. A herd of ironhorn rams, grazing silently on the lushness around them. Their matted, muddy coats, the dull placidity in their orange eyes transported him back to childhood on his grandfather’s ranch, so long ago, and so far away. Before he and his people had known what war was.
Their shepherd was a daharna.
A daharna farming. Not planning for a battle, not leading his troops in drills.
But farming.
Tuma had but a spark of life left within him, and yet he found a way to rise, to make one last mad dash, to scream wordlessly with his dying voice. Anything to catch the daharna’s attention. Anything to end his solitude.
The shepherd’s arms found him, and instead of joy, Tuma was filled with doubt.
It was the shapeshifter, tormenting him with a glimmer of hope before it snuffed him out. It was a baterra, come to finish the job at last. It was a dying vision, a dream he had long since forsworn, returning to curse him in his final moments.
“Are you real?” he couldn’t stop asking in his awful, broken rasp. “Are you real? Are you real?”
“Yes,” the daharna said. “Yes, my brother, of course I’m real! Why do you ask such things?”
Tuma’s hands found the muscles of the shepherd’s back, he felt the man’s voice rumble deep in his chest. He seemed so solid, so true… That couldn’t be imitated, could it?
His leg. He had to be sure. Tuma’s hand trailed along the scars that wound up and down the outside of his own shin.
“T-these,” the words felt unfamiliar on his dry, swollen tongue. “Can you… Read these?”
The shepherd looked down and narrowed his eyes, following Tuma’s hand along the runes.
“‘Tuma, son of Molta, son of Ganotra,’” he read aloud.
Then he looked back up at Tuma, a flicker of recognition in his pale pink eyes.
“Ganotra…” the shepherd said. “Yes, I remember Ganotra. His daughter was close to my mother. He would let me ride ironhorns on his land, until I was too big… They were taken from us, when the world Shattered.”
Tuma buckled at once, clinging to this lonely shepherd tighter than he had ever clung to his empire. He did not sob, for he did not have the strength.
It’s true. Spherus Magna is whole again. It’s all true.
You’ve come home.
He could not fully describe what he felt in that moment of realization, except to say it was the heaviest he had felt and the lightest he had felt all at the same time.
He let the shepherd press a canteen to his lips and help him tilt his head back so he could drink. He was cautious at first, then greedy when the coolness brought relief to his ravaged lips and throat. After all, water was abundant here, was it not?
“How is it that you are home again?” The shepherd whispered in awe, one strong hand pressed to Tuma’s forehead.
“Far,” Tuma whispered, finally letting his eyes slip closed. “I have come so very far."