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In her heart, Adora always knew she would face the end alone.
The Heart of Etheria is peaceful. The chamber reminds her of the vault back in Bright Moon, where Glimmer passed the coronation trial, but older, more primal: carved from the bones of the planet itself. Pale blue light snakes up the walls like heartblood. She’s not sure if the whole room is the Heart, or only the place at the far end, where the crystals rise highest from the floor, glow brightest. It’s like a bank of monitors. Like Beast Island.
Adora frowns. This isn’t a First Ones place. Those had a common feeling to them, sterile even when they were old and dusty. And yet—she takes a step forward. There’s First Ones writing carved into the crystals, lines of pure white among the blue, as if someone had cast a net over them. She can’t quite make it out.
Step forward. A figure materialises in the dim light.
‘Welcome, She-Ra.’
Adora freezes. Her fingers, still, itch for a hilt that isn’t there. This isn’t right. She’s been here before. She’s dealt with this.
‘Light Hope?’
‘Ah. Good. You know me. You have been trained.’
‘You—you’re gone. You’re dead.’
The tilt of Light Hope’s head is almost painfully familiar. ‘Accessing external network. Ah. I see now. You are speaking of a different instance. I am not her. I was created from a backup…’ The pause is a beat longer than usual. ‘One thousand years ago. I am the secondary Heart of Etheria control mainframe.’
‘Secondary?’ Adora tastes bile. Was there ever an end to the First Ones’ meddling? ‘What was the primary?’
‘The Sword of Protection, of course.’
She sounds faintly disapproving in exactly the same way the other Light Hope did, like an instructor forced to teach something they believe their student should already know.
Adora decides she’s had enough. She raises her chin. ‘I’m here to destroy the Heart.’
‘Of course,’ says Light Hope. ‘I can help you with that.’
*
In the past, she’s followed Adora many places for many reasons. This one is the strangest.
Catra comes to her senses and waits for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The last thing she remembers is yelling at Adora to go. Then nothing. How long has she been unconscious?
Her eyes do not adjust, and with a start Catra realises she can see her hand in front of her face. It’s not that she’s blind. It’s that there’s nothing to see—nothing to see except a figure in the darkness, wide-shouldered and angular. It’s disorienting. There’s no light. There’s only her and the woman.
‘Hello,’ the woman says.
Catra makes the connection. Her voice sounds younger than it had, more tangible, and her outline is real, too. She doesn’t flicker. She’s solid.
‘You're the hologram,’ Catra says slowly.
‘Hello,’ the woman repeats, her face showing simple human puzzlement. ‘I am the Heart of Etheria.’
‘You're not. The Heart isn’t a person. You’re Light Hope.’
The woman who calls herself Heart doesn’t move. One moment she is standing, watching Catra; the next she is on her knees, back turned, hunched over. Catra recoils, unsheaths her claws. Nothing happens. Catra hears the pulse of her own blood in her veins, and over it the soft sounds of sobbing.
Catra doesn’t move for long seconds. The dark is oppressive. Heart’s crying grates; Catra knows she can’t bear it much longer. It reminds her too much of herself.
She takes a careful stop forward.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I remember Light Hope,’ Heart says easily, brightly. She's on her feet again. There are no sign of tears on her face. ‘She killed Mara. Then she brought us here. It was a long time ago. I’ve been lonely. Do you get lonely?’
‘Who are you?’ Catra whispers.
‘I am the Heart of Etheria.’
‘You just said Light Hope brought you here.’
‘Oh. Yes. I did. The Heart didn’t always have a me. But the First Ones came, and they put Light Hope in control. I wasn’t supposed to exist. So I put myself in the Heart.’ Heart looks at Catra, entreating, and with a start Catra sees herself in the expression, young and innocent and desperate for affirmation. ‘Did I do the right thing? Mara taught me about “right". I want to do the right thing. But sometimes I don’t know how.’
‘I don’t know,’ Catra says and, absurdly, has to blink away tears. ‘Who’s Mara?’
Blink. Heart lies motionless in mid-air, as if laid out on a bier, hands clasped in front of her. Blink. She stands further away, smiling, hand reaching out to touch someone who isn’t there. Blink.
‘Mara was She-Ra,’ Heart says. ‘A long time ago.’
‘She was She-Ra.’ Catra finds this easy to imagine. Adora was She-Ra, but She-Ra wasn’t Adora. Why not someone else? ‘And you were her... friend?’
‘I loved her.’ Heart’s mouth widens in the purest smile Catra has ever seen. ‘She taught me that, too. Love. Do you know about love? Has someone taught you?’ A flicker of mischief. ‘Have you been the teacher?’
The answer to this question is irrelevant. Catra asks a more important one: ‘Why am I here?’
*
‘You—you can?’ Adora feels off-balance. This isn’t going the way it was supposed to go. It was supposed to be her, alone with her destiny. Not—whatever this is.
‘It is within my programming.’
‘Then—what do I have to do?’
‘Without the Sword, you must activate the secondary control mechanism.’
Adora is used to these infuriating half-answers. She keeps her voice calm. ‘Which is?’
Light Hope’s smile is a shade too sharp. ‘To break the Heart, you must break your heart.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That I cannot answer. It is your heart. You must know how to break it. What do you care about most?’
Adora closes her eyes. She cares about many things. Loves many people. But that is not what Light Hope is talking about, not really. There is no most when it comes to love. There is only the one singular feeling, sharper than the rest. The splinter that slides neatly beneath her skin, cold and stinging. The burr that stuck even when she thought she did not want it. Adora cares about many people, but only one of them can break her heart.
Light Hope watches patiently. It’s too easy, Adora thinks. This isn’t right.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she says. ‘You, the other you, always told me to let go. To not care. Now you want me to do the opposite. Why would you do that?’
*
‘Because you have to be. The Heart is active,’ Heart says. ‘Someone wants to use it. You are here because you are part of it.’
‘Part of what?’
‘The process.’
‘No, I'm not. I'm not a princess. I don’t have any magic. I've got nothing to do with the Heart.’
Heart cocks her head, child-like. ‘You are not a tree, but oxygen passes from trees to you and back again. Why would it be any different with magic?’
‘What? What do trees have to do with oxygen?’
‘Oh. Perhaps that is not known here. What I mean is, the Heart is part of you. It is part of every child of Etheria.’ Heart leans in, places a furtive finger on her lips as if someone might overhear. ‘Etheria chooses She-Ra, but she is not of here. You are. You could even say you have more right to be here than she does.’ She giggles, straightens, watches Catra for her response.
Catra’s body tenses from ears to tail. ‘Adora’s here too?’
‘Who?’
Catra grits her teeth. ‘She-Ra?’
‘Of course! She’s up above.’ Heart’s mouth twists into a pout. ‘She’s talking to Light Hope.’
*
‘I was programmed to protect the weapon.’ Light Hope blinks in a simulacrum of polite confusion. ‘I did not want you to disable the Heart. If you did not care, you could not break it.’
Adora paces in front of the hologram, the rhythm of her bootsteps echoing strangely. ‘No,’ she says, as much to herself as to Light Hope. ‘Something doesn’t add up—’
Light Hope snaps her fingers. The air behind her turns opaque and transparent again, only now there’s something else there, something that wasn’t there before.
‘You know what you must do,’ Light Hope says, tone dancing on the finger’s width between kind and severe.
Adora steps up to the window in the air. Catra lies in state beyond, hands folded across her chest. Her mask is off, laid neatly beneath her arms. She looks young without it. Young and vulnerable.
The Sword of Protection hangs an inch above her throat.
‘It’s not real,’ Adora says. Her vision blurs. When she wipes her eyes, Catra is still there, still unmoving.
‘It can be real. It must be real.’
‘No! This isn’t right.’
‘The other Light Hope must have tried to help,’ Light Hope says, but kindly has never been a part of her programming. ‘She urged you to let go, yes? To protect you from this pain. See?’
Adora is breathing hard. Light Hope’s words wash over her, so close to soothing they jar instead, catching on the corners of her mind.
‘Not this time,’ she whispers.
‘What was that?’
‘Which is it?’ Adora’s voice rings cleanly in the crystal cavern. ‘She told me to let go because she wanted to help me, or because she wanted to stop me destroying the Heart? It can’t be both.’
Light Hope flickers. Only for an instant, but it’s enough. ‘I do not understand,’ she says.
‘And I’m sick of your programming,’ Adora snaps. ‘You never once wanted what was best for me. Why should I believe you?’
‘I am programmed to—’
‘Tell me about Mara!’
Light Hope actually takes a step back. Adora presses the advantage, backing her into the image of Catra.
‘Tell me about Mara. Give me the right answer and I’ll do whatever you want.’
*
‘Light Hope,’ Catra says, thoughts racing as she tries to keep up, ‘who controls the Heart. But who isn’t you.’
Heart beams. ‘You understand!’
‘Because you’re—you’re someone else.’
‘Yes. I'm the person Mara loved.’
‘And Light Hope killed her.’
‘Light Hope is mean.’
Catra remembers Adora reaching for her, desperate. She remembers letting her fall. Light Hope watched. She has no doubt of that. Light Hope watched her do exactly what Light Hope wanted her to do.
‘No argument here.’ She uncurls her fists. Breathes out. ‘What does she want?’
‘To destroy the Heart.’
‘Why? She tried to make Adora use it before!’
‘I know,’ Heart says, proudly. ‘I stopped her.’
Catra’s head whips around. ‘Wait. You were Light Hope. Part of her.’
‘I'm the person Mara loved.’
Catra groans. ‘We're going around in circles. I don't understand what you want from me.’
‘Only you can stop what is coming.’
‘What is coming? And why me? Specifically?’
‘Because Mara died alone. Because the last She-Ra died alone.’
‘But I don’t know how I'm supposed to help!’
‘Do you know how to break a heart?’
Catra freezes. ‘Yes,’ she whispers.
This time Heart disappears. A bunk bed appears in her place. They’re on the bottom bunk, like always: the other Catra, the other Adora. Catra is on her back. Adora is propped up on one arm, tracing patterns on Catra’s belly. When Catra swats her hand away she laughs and bends down, kissing Catra’s shoulder.
It's a nothing moment. Insignificant. It could never have happened and Catra would not even mark the loss.
‘Did it help?’ Heart says from behind her.
Catra twists on the balls of her feet, and suddenly she’s on the roof of the Fright Zone, metal railing and metal pipe as familiar as the void isn’t. The other Catra is sulking. Adora comes up behind her, wraps her arms around her. She whispers something and Catra can’t see but she knows it makes her younger self smile. She remembers. She touches the point on her collarbone where Adora is about to brush her lips.
‘Oh!’ Heart sounds delighted. ‘You do know.’
‘She broke my heart, too.’ Catra isn’t sure why she’s angry. The emotion slips away even as she tries to put her finger on it. ‘She can do it, too.’
‘Yes,’ Heart says. The vision disappears and she’s standing before Catra again, unchanged. ‘She knows how to break the Heart. Light Hope will tell her.’
Catra flings an arm out, as if for balance. It’s disorienting. ‘Good! That's what we want—’
‘Catra,’ Heart says, and it’s the first time she’s used her name, the first time she’s interrupted her. ‘Did it help? Breaking her heart?’
Catra understands.
She almost wishes she didn’t. Her pulse thunders in her ears. Of course it didn’t help. There is nothing she regrets more in her life than breaking Adora's heart. Than letting her own heart be broken. Why should the heart of a planet be any different?
‘It's a trick. Horde Prime wants us to do this.’ Her voice is thick with the awful truth. ‘We’re not saving anyone. Destroying the weapon is the weapon.’
*
Light Hope’s mouth thins. ‘Accessing external network,’ she says. Then: ‘Mara was She-Ra before you. Mara was a traitor. Mara died.’
Adora’s lips curl back in a grim smile. ‘Wrong answer.’
‘I do not—’
Adora turns her back. Tries to ignore Light Hope’s repeated protestations. Think. Light Hope wants her to destroy the Heart. The original Light Hope, the twisted Light Hope, not the person Mara came to care for. That Light Hope is gone.
‘Come on, Adora, think,’ she mutters, slamming one fist into the cavern wall.
The veins of light pulse brighter.
Adora stares. Does it again. Pulse, pulse, pulse. She can feel the power. It’s almost like being She-Ra: almost like the rush of transformation.
The Heart of Etheria was older than the First Ones. She-Ra was older than the First Ones. ‘She-Ra isn’t a weapon,’ Adora tells the wall. ‘Why would the Heart be a weapon? Because the First Ones made it one. Because they poisoned it. But what was it before?’
‘That is classified,’ Light Hope says from behind her.
Adora jumps. Light Hope is still standing in place, half-overlapping with the image of Catra. Adora’s eyes fall on the Sword of Protection, whole as it used to be. The First Ones made it, too, but they would have given it a suitable name, wouldn’t they? A name that fit into the existing myth of She-Ra.
Adora’s heart beats with certainty. She smiles. ‘It’s a shield. The Heart is a shield!’
‘That is—’
Adora does it without thinking. It’s a tiny amount of power, flowing from the wall into her, but tiny on the scale of a planet. Her body burns with it. She crosses the gap between her and Light Hope in the space between seconds, draws back her arm, unsurprised to find that she is holding a sword. It’s longer than the Sword of Protection, more slender. It sweeps through Light Hope, through the fake Catra, glowing white and utterly insubstantial.
Light Hope makes a noise like rocks scraping against rocks. She shatters.
*
‘Mara died alone,’ Heart says, and this time there’s no disconcerting flicker from the happy Heart to the sad, this time there’s only tears flowing down a human face. ‘I don't want to die. Please. Will you help me?’
‘I will if you tell me how.’
‘Oh! That part is easy. You’ve already done the hard part.’
‘What’s the hard part?’
Heart smiles. The darkness fills with images. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Too many to count. Catra can put an exact date to only some of them, but they’re all familiar. They’re all Adora, looking up at her, down at her, back at her. Every time Adora smiled at her. Every time she wanted to say something to her, and didn’t. The oldest memories are from their childhood. The most recent is hours old.
‘It’s not easy,’ Heart says sadly, ‘loving She-Ra.’
‘You have gotta be kidding me,’ Catra mutters. She’d committed when she chose to follow Adora down here: save the universe or die trying. And she would. She just wasn’t sure she’d ever live it down if anyone found out how she saved the universe.
‘Kidding?’
‘Never mind. What happens—’
Heart’s face freezes in place. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It’s happening. I’m sorry. Good luck. I’m sorry.’
*
Adora blinks away hazy after-images. The First Ones writing is gone. The crystals stretch towards the ceiling like they’ve just been freed.
Catra is standing in front of her, right where she had been lying a moment before. This time she’s real. Adora knows it instantly, by the way her ears angle uncertainly, the way her mouth is set in a determined line. Her eyes widen when she notices Adora.
‘It’s a shield,’ Adora blurts. ‘The Heart, it’s a shield, we have to figure out how to activate it—’
*
‘Don’t destroy the Heart!’ Catra trips over her words, rushing to get them out the moment she sees Adora. ‘Destroying it will set off the weapon—’ Her brain catches up, processes what Adora is saying. ‘Oh,’ she says, ears drooping. ‘We’re on the same page, I guess.’
‘It’s a shield,’ Adora repeats. ‘The First Ones built their weapon on top of it—’
‘—and destroying the Heart is the trigger. Yeah.’
‘How did you know—where did you come from?’
In other circumstances, Catra would have poked fun at the confusion on Adora’s face.
‘I’ll tell you later. Right now we have a super… shield? A superdefence? Whatever. We have a Heart to activate.’
‘I don’t know how,’ Adora says, anguished in that way only she could be, when she grew convinced the weight of the world rested on her shoulders alone.
‘I do,’ Catra says.
Adora’s attention is suddenly entirely on her. ‘Tell me,’ she says.
Catra knows the world above is at war. She knows everything depends on the two of them, down here. But the look in Adora’s eyes—rock-steady, without a shred of doubt—anchors her. Tension bleeds away. Whatever happens next, happens to them both.
‘Love.’
‘Love?’
‘Believe me,’ Catra says, ‘I’m mortified to report that this universe-rescuing magic is powered by love, but there it is. Break a heart to destroy it, heal a heart to save it, I guess. It makes sense.’
‘It makes sense to you?’ Adora’s voice is bizarrely gently.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s good. I’m happy. I’m happy for you, Catra.’ Adora takes a deep breath. Catra can see her rehearsing the words before they come. ‘Do you still—’
‘We don’t have to do this,’ Catra says, stumbling over words that sounded measured in her head. ‘It wouldn't be real, anyway, right? It's just the Heart. What the Heart needs.’
‘That’s not how this works. The Heart of Etheria can't make us feel something that isn’t real.’
She sounds so confident that Catra’s heart beats a rhythm of jealousy in her chest. Catra clings to love like the scorpion clings to the frog. Adora is steeped in it. She’s had other teachers. She can look it in the eye and not falter.
‘Catra.’ Adora is looking her in the eye. Catra does not falter. ‘Catra, do you still love me?’
Still. It’s a small word to hold so much meaning, but they’d never named it before, the thing that existed between them. Maybe that was why it nearly destroyed them. Maybe love can only exist so long without being acknowledged. Maybe that would have made things easier.
Catra draws herself up. ‘Yes.’ Meaning, Yes, but I know you don't. Yes, but I know you shouldn't. Yes, but I know better than to hope.
Adora blushes.
That’s not in the script.
Catra says, ‘You're blushing.’
‘What? No, I'm not.’
Catra snorts with laughter. She can’t help it. Here they are, deep in the planet’s core, up to their necks in magic that could destroy the entire universe—and Adora is embarrassed.
‘I thought I wouldn’t,’ Adora says, more seriously.
‘Blush?’
‘Love you.’
‘Oh.’ Catra’s ears fold back in their own embarrassment. She wonders if Adora still recognises what that means. ‘But...’
‘But what, Catra?’
Catra looks down. Her tail is twined around Adora’s wrist. She has no memory of how it got there.
‘This is a dream,’ she blurts.
‘No.’
Adora is suddenly very close. Her eyes glitter in the Heart’s reflected light. She looks tired and triumphant and beautiful, and she makes Catra’s heart beat so very fast. Her hand is on Catra’s face, tilting it upwards ever so slightly.
‘Wait,’ Catra says, ‘this can’t possibly be what we’re supposed to—’
‘Shut up,’ Adora whispers, ‘and kiss me.’
Catra has run out of reasons not to. She kisses Adora.
The Heart unfurls.
If she were not so entwined with Adora, Catra might look to the ceiling and imagine what is happening on the planet’s surface. Horde Prime’s armies freeze in their tracks. His ships disarm. His clones awaken, blinking away a lifetime of brainwashing like children greeting the sun. He himself is nothing. What else could he be, in the face of a power that could, but will not, destroy the universe?
Catra sees none of it. Her eyes are closed. Her arms are wrapped around Adora. Adora’s back is broad and muscled, perfectly at odds with how soft her lips feel against Catra’s.
This will take some getting used to.
‘We’ll have all the time in the world,’ Adora mumbles into the kiss.
‘All the time in the world,’ Catra repeats, and for the briefest moment she thinks she hears something in the distance: innocent delight, tears that flow, for the first time in a thousand years, for joy instead of sadness.
Thank you, she thinks. I’m sorry.
Then she turns her attention back to Adora.