She-Ra: Broken Reflections (CH 4)

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Adora felt like the tour was going well. She was enjoying it even though Princess Scorpia looked really nervous, which made Adora feel nervous in turn. The two of them were walking on one of the catwalks along the northern edge of the city. 

Adore opened her mouth to ask something, then yelped and dodged around a Scorpioni carrying a heavy crate. After he passed, Adora pressed herself close to Scorpia. There was way more traffic here than there had been near the palace, and she didn’t want to get lost. Down below it was even worse; every non-Scorpioni in the city seemed to be out today, choking the streets. The sight made Adora catch her breath— it was two or three times as many people as she'd ever seen in one place before.

"The, uh, the railing is new," Scorpia said, trying to keep the tour going. "Yeah, ‘cuz we pretty much just had Scorponi here before Hordak’s tech started bringing new people in. Queen Lynda started working on making the city safer when Princess Catra came to live with us— though, um, don't say anything about it to her. She'd get embarrassed."

Adora nodded, then dug in her pockets for her notebook. "Was all that stuff hard to add?"

"Is," Scorpia corrected. "We're still working on it. Stairs have been a huge pain, let me tell you. I mean, there’s plenty inside businesses and stuff, but the shopkeeps still get all mad if you just cut through their stores. Mom— Uh, Queen Lynda is working on building these, uh… well those.”

The platform Scorpia was pointing at was-- mechanical. Mechanical was the only word Adora could think of to describe it; the railing had pipes around them, all connecting to a big mess of equipment that wove around large blocks. It was nearly alive, with moving parts that worked in a rhythm she could see but not fathom. It hissed and… buzzed? The noises didn’t even make sense to Adora, but Scorpia wasn’t afraid of it so she reluctantly clambered on after her. She stayed very close to the Princess as the noises intensified, and then grabbed her claw when the platform started moving. 

“Don’t worry,” Scorpia said. “You're safe, I promise.” 

Adora didn’t move immediately, but she let go as the platform continued to float away from the scaffolding without crashing. “Sorry,” she said, blushing. 

“It’s fine,” Scorpia said assuringly. “New stuff is always intimidating.” 

Adora cautiously peered over the edge of the platform, gripping the railing tightly. They were moving at a light jog, hundreds of feet over the streets and maybe two dozen feet over the railing. People would glance at the platform but mostly ignored it. “How does it work?”

“Oh, like…” Scorpia waved a claw nervously. “Queen Lynda took apart a lot of stuff from Hordak’s ship that crashed and learned how they worked. Hordak helped her with a lot of it before he left the city. It’s got, like, stuff that repels gravity? I think they get pushed away by gravity when they’re switched on. And there’s a strip of— they aren’t magnets, but they do magnet stuff— but like, only to each other?”

Adora thought about that for a second. “So the platform is pushed up by gravity and then, when you’re at the height you want, the stuff along the sides is turned on you and you get towards stuff on the wall?”

Scorpia nodded. “We have a version that can go wherever, but the platforms follow a specific path so they never crash into each other.”

"I never realized how useful technology could be," Adora said thoughtfully. "Back home, anything fancier than a lighter is usually some type of con... Only crazy people get into—" She froze for a second, eyes wide. "I am so, so sorry…"

"Nah, I've met Entrapta," Scorpia said, waving her off, "I get it. But I promise that machines can be just as useful in everyday situations as magic is." 

“Thanks,” Adora said. “Please don’t tell my Mom I screwed up.”

Scorpia nodded. “It’s no big deal. She seems…” Adora looked at the Princess, who suddenly looked nervous. “Upset?” Scorpia offered.

"No, when she gets mad she’s all quiet." Adora shivered a little, in spite of all the layers she was wearing. Her lips pressed together in a firm line, she turned away from Scorpia and looked down at the crowd below. The noise was... nice, honestly. It reminded her of Sports Day back home. "No, she just wanted to start her research earlier. She loves magic."

"Hm," Scorpia said. There was a creaking noise as she started to lean on the rail that stopped as she thought better of it. "What kind of stuff does she like?"

"Magic."

Scorpia shook her head. "No, like, what do you guys do for fun?"

Adora looked up at Scorpia, a look of confusion on her face. The Princess was looking at her with an odd, concerned expression. "...Magic?" Adora said again, suddenly worried it was the wrong answer. 

Scorpia hesitated. "Just that? You don't have… like, a puzzle night? Or do karaoke?"

Adora laughed nervously, suddenly positive she was giving the wrong answer. "No, I'm not allowed to sing anymore."

Scorpia laughed even more nervously. "Um, what?"

"Oh, it's not like," she waved her hands, "a rule or anything! I just embarrassed myself at a singing competition. That’s all.”

It was, essentially, a lie; but one close enough to the truth that Adora didn’t feel bad about it. She understood that it wasn’t actually important now, but for some reason remembering it made her cringe. 

She’d been eight years old, or very close to it; a grown-up in her own mind. She had been a pretty good singer (also in her own mind) and had begged Light Spinner to let her try out for the Mystacor Institute Choir. She had pleaded so much, in fact, that Light Spinner had finally given up on trying to get her to focus on her studies, and gave her a few lessons. 

The night of the competition, Light Spinner helped Adora into her best dress and helped her put her long hair into a very grown-up bun. She’d stood up there on the stage, in all those lights, in front of all those people, and sung her little heart out. She was on verse eight of her song when she looked out at the crowd and, through the spotlights and the darkness beyond, spotted her mother. 

Adora could barely make out Light Spinner’s expression; she was sitting in the far back, in the shadow of the large balcony. Instead of looking at the stage, she was thumbing through an old book. She glanced up, briefly meeting Adora’s gaze, then returning to her reading.

Adora flinched and missed a word. She scrambled to catch up, and never really found her groove again before the song came to a crash landing of a conclusion. 

Light Spinner hadn’t yelled at her that time. She almost wished she had. At least it would have been better than her quiet, simmering disappointment…

Something big and warm touched her shoulder. Adora jumped and spun around, only to see Scorpia backing off. "Sorry!" Scorpia said. "You, uh, you looked sad."

Adora took a breath and nodded. "Sorry." She straightened up and smiled the way Light Spinner had taught her. "Where did you say we were going?"

Scorpia looked at Adora with an odd expression that made her look like one of Adora's teachers. Adora shifted her weight from one foot to the other, still smiling nervously. "The Bizarre Bazaar," Scorpia said. "It's like a cross between a carnival and an open market, but if you need a minute—'

"No, no," Adora insisted. "I'm good, really!!" She grinned broadly and gave Scorpia a thumbs up. Scorpia looked incredibly confused and attempted to return the gesture with her claws. Adora patted her on the claw and turned to look at the city, cursing her inability to have a normal conversation.  Dummy, she scolded herself. She was already upset, and now you're being rude. She couldn’t even figure out how to be a guest right.

“So,” Scorpia said after they’d floated for a few minutes, “you haven’t talked much. Do you like the city?” 

Adora nodded quickly. “It’s so different from Mystacor, but also… not?” She shook her head. “It’s weird... How you guys do all the same stuff in different ways, I mean,” she added lamely.

Scorpia nodded. “I know what you mean."

“Oh, good.” Adora’s shoulders sagged a little in relief. “I don’t always make sense when I’m talking. It’s why I write things down so much,” she said, putting the notebook back in her pocket.

“Me either,” Scorpia said. She sounded sincere, but she was probably just trying to be nice.

She didn’t say anything else and Adora couldn’t think of anything to add, so they just kept moving in silence. Are conversations supposed to just... stop like that? she wondered.

Unsure what else to do, she put her hands in her pockets and touched her glasses. She pulled out the glasses and slipped them on, eager to see what kinds of magic they used, and yelped in surprise. Back in Mystacor, there was so much magic that everything she saw through the glasses shone brightly enough that she couldn’t wear them for more than a minute. But in the Light Zone, it was like Adora was suddenly dunked in the darkest part of the ocean. 

The only point of clarity was a red, glowing thread. It stretched from the palace in the distance, all the way back to— she turned around, following its path— to Scorpia herself, where it branched into a dozen paths, each connecting to different parts of her body. Very slow blue pulses flowed down the thread to Scorpia and then back up the thread.

Scorpia grimaced when a particularly big one sank into her body. "I didn't know you wore glasses," she said, rubbing her head with a claw  

Adora nodded vaguely as she looked around. Now that she had a chance to actually look, she could see other lights in the darkness— little spots, here and there, sparkling like stars. A few arcane vendors, little trinkets in the crowd, things like that. But— Adora frowned— the streetlights were coming into focus, too. They weren’t glowing, not exactly, but they weren’t fading away like the rest of the city. 

“Are those lights powered by magic?” Adora asked, pointing. 

Scorpia followed her gaze, then nodded. “Yep. Powered by the Black Garnet, like everything else.” She squinted, then frowned. “Though,” she added, “they’re not supposed to come on this early…”

Adora tilted her head. Adora could feel some kind of will, could almost see it with her glasses if she concentrated hard enough on the right spot.  “I think…” she said slowly, “there's something inside your magic right now,”  she said slowly. “Maybe it has something to do with Mom’s experiments…” 

Adora’s voice trailed off. Arcs of crackling lights poured from the lightbulbs out of the lightbulbs in a slowly-unknotting tangle. They had nothing in common with natural lightning; growing in the air above her like the ghost of a tree and spiraling in every direction. She smelled ozone and something else, something out of place and old. She took her glasses off and stepped closer to the stunned Scorpia, holding them tightly in her hand.

People began to shout and point at the magic. The entire catwalk was covered in an eerie sheen, giving everything a haunted feeling. There was a burst of light whenever two branches touched, making odd sparks that floated away as a new tangle of lightning slowly grew together and flowed in a new direction. “It’s beautiful,” Adora said, “isn’t it?”

Scorpia didn’t answer. Adora looked down— well, looked less up— and saw that Scorpia looked stricken. One of her claws was gripping the metal railing and twisting it, and she wasn’t looking at the magic. Her eyes were fixed in the middle distance, and her mouth vainly tried to form words before giving up and falling open. 

Adora waved a hand in front of Scorpia’s face, and slowly she turned to look down at Adora. Her eyes weren’t right at all; they had the same blue glow as the magic above. Brief flashes of red appeared, accompanied by twitches of her eyes and grimaces across her face, but they disappeared almost immediately.

“Princess Scorpia?” Adora asked again.

“A...dor...A,” Scorpia whispered. 

Adora took a step back. Scorpia took a step forward. Her skin was being leeched of color, and her movements were as unsteady as a stage marionette from a puppet show. Scorpia’d forgotten to let go of the railing and it made an ungodly screech as it came apart. Blue lightning trailed down through the metal, surrounding her on all sides. The platform jerked to a halt, the noise of the engine sputtering out and replaced with magic's ethereal hum.

Slowly, Adora slipped her glasses back over her face. 

Scorpia’s magic had the same shape as before, but the sparks were moved so quickly it looked like the thread tying her to the Black Garnet was covered in eerie blue fire. Scorpia's body jolted a little each time one reached her, and replacing the healthy red glow was more of the ghostly blue magic.

Worst of all: Inside Scorpia's magic was a second face, sitting behind her real one. It was smooth and undetailed, sharing more traits with a mask than a person. Its eyes were fixed on Adora, unblinking and unmoving.

"A...dora," Scorpia was made to say, "Balance must be restored, Adora." The thing reaching through Scorpia forced her claws towards Adora, blue sparks bursting from them like sparklers. 

"Get back!" Adora snapped. It stopped moving Scorpia, looking almost confused. Adora took an angry step forward, and the platform swayed uncertainly  “Just— leave her alone! Leave us alone!”

“The time has come,” said the thing, sounding confused. 

Adora paled. She’d read about things like this; bizarre creatures that lived inside the Well of Magic and hungered for people’s souls. The only thing taught about them was that they drove people insane. “Get out of her!” she demanded, giving Scorpia’s body a useless shove. “What do you want?”

“You.” Scorpia’s head was tilted to the side as it just kept staring at her through Scorpia’s eyes. “I must show you your destiny.”

Her claws were pushed down and grabbed Adora, She shrieked as lightning flooded her body and then ideas were flooding her mind, something about a sword and duty and a tower and it hurt and—

Adora twisted free and fell on her back. Scorpia was slowly bent over to grab her again but Adora rolled backward, putting as much distance between them as she could. She looked behind her; the railing was still covered in tendrils of lightning and there was a terrifying sixty-foot drop to the street below. The platform shook and she staggered, pulling her backpack off, and rooting through it for something that could help.“What destiny?” She demanded. “What are you?”

“Light Hope,” again the words awkwardly were pushed through Scorpia's mouth. “I am here to help you against your mother."

"I love my mother!" Adora shouted. "Why would I fight her?"

"She lied to us," Scorpia was made to say. "She was to tell you of your destiny."

"What destiny?" Adora almost laughed. "I'm barely passing my classes!”

“You have so much more power than you know," Light Hope said. "You will take it up and become She-Ra.”

Inside her pack, Adora’s fingers brushed against a small wooden box. “Or what?” she growled.

"Or nothing. It is Destiny." The word destiny was pronounced with finality, like the words were iron bars locking a cell. "Destiny exists above what we want," Light Hope continued. "Our purpose demands to be fulfilled."

"Yeah?" Adora asked. Her hand closed around her spellbox and she yanked it out, pointing it at the thing inside Scorpia’s body. "Fill this!"

Adora knew this was dangerous even before she pulled the spellbox out. Magic was the only thing holding the platform up, and with it gone they'd smash into the street below. Adora knew she'd be lucky to die immediately; but more importantly, she knew Princess Scorpia wouldn't be hurt by the fall. She had to take the chance.

Adora ducked every piece of magic spun towards the box, but she wasn’t fast enough to avoid it all. A stray bolt of energy went through her back to get to the box and Adora found herself floating in a dozen different places at once: a crashed spaceship in a desert, at the bottom of a cave looking up at the stars,  in the midst of a strange forest of metal trees, on the balcony of a tower deep in the Whispering Woods— 

With a gasp, she fell onto the catwalk. Above her, a storm of reality and unreality was forcing itself into the box, a dense fog made of grey and black and then something even emptier than black. Currents of magic only briefly shone through the din, freakish flashes of power that made everything so visible you could see each molecule of the air itself. Adora pressed herself tightly against the ground and shook; whatever this thing was, it wasn’t supposed to fit in a spellbox that small.

Sparks briefly escaped the pull and drifted through Adora again, making her cry out as they burnt her. She saw brief flashes of her mother in a castle made of crystal. She spoke to a woman made of blue light and held something Adora couldn’t make out.

Adora shook her head as the vision cleared. That’s a lie! She thought. Mom hasn’t even been to the Whispering Woods before! She—

The box began to release an unholy SCR-eEeEeSCH as it began to come apart. Adora suddenly noticed that she knew the tower was in the Whispering Woods. She knew its exact location and how to get there. She knew how old the tower was, where the stones had been quarried, the names of the creatures who had built it. And how her mother—

—Her mother, taking her as a baby, from some sort of portal. Her mother, making a deal with Light Hope. Her mother, agreeing to be a mother, because it got her what she wanted.

“Stop it!” Adora snapped. She pushed herself away from Scorpia, away from the box as it began to come apart. “I’m not, I can’t be— Because that’s a lie, and she wouldn’t—” 

The box exploded. 

It wasn’t a violent explosion, as explosions go. One final, disturbing scream, a pulse of energy, and the box just fell apart. The feeling of falling loomed larger in Adora’s mind, the deceptively slow way the platform drifted down from her contrasted against the walls whipping past her. She couldn’t reach anything, couldn’t do anything but watch her death charging up towards her. She didn’t scream, didn’t bother flailing around. There just wasn’t a point.

Something smacked into her, knocking the breath out of her. The platform kept falling but Adora was moving away, held by something. “Scorpia?” She asked.

Scorpia shifted Adora’s weight to one arm. “Hang on!” she shouted.

Obediently Adora grabbed Scorpia’s waist and didn’t let go. They seemed to float for a few seconds before smashing into the city wall. Adora gasped, stunned, as they hung from the stone wall. “I’ve got you,” Scorpia said. “Are you okay? What happened?”

Adora shook her head. “I don’t… I’m not a…”

Scorpia gave Adora a few moments to answer, then said gently, “I’m going to put us down on the catwalks. We’ll get someone to look at you, okay?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Adora tried to say. “I mean, much. I’m fine.”

Scorpia ignored her. Adora wasn’t sure if the princess even heard. They made another dizzying jump, Adora desperately clinging as they fell. The impact rattled her teeth, and she gasped in pain. Scorpia gently set her down and she fell to her knees. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and as she leaned on the railing she realized the lighting had burned her skin. 

All of that felt so distant to Adora. She couldn’t think; her nausea was getting worse and she started to slide down to her knees. 

“She lied to me,” Adora whispered. “Mom lied to me. She doesn’t want me, she—”

What even am I?