Chapter Text
“You're on a path in the woods, and at the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a prince.”
Pete was in a forest. It was a beautiful evergreen forest; as far as he could see, a path wound through hills of deep green fir trees. Birds sang overhead as the glow of the early morning sun lit the treetops.
Looking down at himself, Pete saw he was wearing a gleaming suit of armor. It was spotless, shining in the rays of sunlight that filtered through the trees. Where was he? How did he get here? The last thing he remembered…
“You're here to slay him.”
Pete spun, looking around for the voice that sounded like it was all around him, all at once. Where was that coming from?
“If you don't, it will be the end of the world.”
“What?” Pete said, still looking around. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“The fate of the world is no joke.”
“Who are you? Where are you?!” Pete asked.
“I am Kinn. Think of me as your narrator. I am nowhere and everywhere, for I am here to guide you.”
Guide him? Pete supposed that made sense. He still couldn't remember Before. Before this moment, this forest, this. He could use a guide.
“Wait, no. No. We’re not going to go through with this, right?” A new voice said. This one felt like it was in his head. “ I mean, he’s a prince. We're supposed to save princes, not slay them… ”
“Ignore him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Kinn said gently, and Pete felt overwhelmed.
“Don’t ignore me!” The new voice protested.
“And who are you?” Pete asked.
“I’m Porsche! I’m…I’m a hero, I think.”
“You think ,” Kinn said stiffly.
“Yes, I think! And I know heroes don’t slay innocent people, they save them.”
“Well, I know we need to slay the prince before he ends the world.”
“That doesn’t feel right,” Porsche insisted, sounding unsure.
“Do you remember where we came from? What we should do?” Pete asked. Porsche didn’t answer, but Pete could feel his hesitation. He was as lost as Pete, which he supposed made sense, for a voice in his head.
“Listen, I am sure of our path,” Kinn said firmly, sounding much less lost, which he supposed made sense for a guiding disembodied voice. “You are here to slay the prince and save the world.”
Pete looked around once more. In all directions, there was nothing but trees. All directions, that is, except the path before him. It didn’t seem like he had a choice.
“Alright. Let’s go slay the prince,” he said and began his trek down the path. “I’m Pete, by the way.”
“Pleased to meet you, Pete.”
“ Yes, quite. You make your way up the short path to the cabin ,” Kinn narrated.
It wasn’t long down the path before the woods began to open to a cleared hill, revealing a small cabin atop it.
“ You'll find the prince within. A warning before you go any further; he will lie, he will cheat, and he will do everything in his power to stop you from slaying him. Don’t believe a word he says. ”
The cabin was a simple log construction with a brick chimney and glass square windows. It looked welcoming and humble; hardly the home of a world-ending villain of a prince. Porsche must have thought the same, as he spoke up again.
“ This doesn’t look like the home of a dangerous world-ender.” Porsche piped up.
“ Did you hear a single word I said? He’s deceptive and dangerous.”
Pete sighed and strode forward. The sooner this was over, it would probably be better.
With Kinn narrating his every move, Pete entered the cabin.“ You entered the cabin. It is a simple construction, with simple log walls, and rough-hewn floors. The furthest wall from you has a simple wooden door, its iron hinges and handle looking as if they have weathered ions without failing. There is little decoration other than a small table in the right corner, where a silver dagger rests.”
“ Lovely description. So glad you’re here to tell us what we see. Really captured the beauty of the place,” Porsche quipped again.
“Can you let me play my role?” Kinn snapped before continuing , “You should pick it up. You will need it to complete the job.”
Pete took the dagger, trying not to give the silver blade much thought. If he’s going to slay someone, he might as well have a weapon, right? Right. Better than…better than his hands. A weapon to put at least a modicum of distance between him and the slain.
Could he really do this? Pete had never slayed anyone before. Or at least, he couldn’t remember slaying anyone before. The dagger felt much heavier than it should.
“ You open the door. It opens to a basement, dark and dank.”
The hinges of the door did little to disguise his approach- they screeched into the yawning darkness of the basement. It seemed there was a spot of light, around the corner, but it was hard to tell at the top of the stairs.
“Hello? Is someone there?” a voice came up from the basement. It was a soft masculine voice, almost like the speaker didn’t want to startle whoever was there, and a little rough with disuse.
“Hello?” Pete called out instinctively and flinched as the narrator piped up.
“Well. There goes our element of surprise.”
“ Let’s talk to him. Maybe there’s no need for slaying.”
“Haven’t you been listening to m-”
“Please, if someone’s there, please come down. I’ve been alone down here for so long.” the voice in the basement spoke again. Ignoring the bickering, Pete quietly descended into the basement. Kinn let go of his argument with Porsche to reassume his role.
“You descend the stairs, knife in hand. The worn wooden stairs creak again, the walls have clearly seen better days. The stairs give way to a dirt floor. The air smells of dust and stagnation. If this is where the prince lives, we’re probably doing him a favor by slaying him.”
Pete stepped down onto the dirt floor and looked into the basement. It was bare of anything, save for the far wall where a man sat chained to the wall by his wrist. The man was softly lit by the sunbeams coming through the small window at the top of the room. His tanned skin spoke of time in the sun, time outside of this basement. His raven hair looked soft and lightly tousled, his face clean and earnest, and his eyes shining with hope.
He was beautiful. Which, as Pete thought about it, made some sense. Aren’t Princes and Princesses always beautiful in stories? Isn’t that usually why, in stories that is, they are hunted down and mistreated? Was this prince mistreated?
Pete didn’t know what he expected from the prince, but it wasn’t this. He expected an opponent, someone threatening, but he found…
“You don’t look like someone who is going to end the world,” Pete said, and suddenly realized he had said it out loud.
“End the world?” the prince asked, his brow furrowing. He gave his restraints a half-hearted tug, making the ancient-looking iron chains clang loudly. “Do I look like I can do anything down here?”
“I’m sorry,” Pete apologized.
“Don’t apologize! He is going to destroy everything!”
Interestingly enough, it didn’t seem like the prince could hear Kinn. He just looked at Pete inquisitively as Pete winced at Kinn’s shouting. Was he wrong to trust the narrator? Even Porsche seemed skeptical of their mission.
“Come, sit with me for a bit,” the prince said. “It’s been so long since I had someone to talk to.”
“Despite your BETTER judgment, you walk over to the prince and sit down. He eyes the dagger in your hand.”
“My name is Vegas,” said the prince. “What’s yours?”
“I”m Pete,” Pete replied. Vegas smiled at him, and the smile felt warm…and familiar. It was the first thing in this world to feel familiar since he came-to in the forest. The way Vegas’ eyes crinkled into crescent moons, the soft curve of his nose in the center of it all…why did Vegas feel like the one thing right in all of this?
“I was told you were going to destroy everything,” Pete continued. “And, to save the world, I had to slay you.”
The smile slipped from Vegas’ face, and his eyes once again shifted to the dagger in Pete’s hand.
“Are you?” Vegas asked, bringing his deep black eyes to look back at Pete. There was a sharpness in those eyes that wasn’t there before, but even that was familiar to Pete, and he had to stop himself from reaching out to this stranger, to smooth away the worry with a touch. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I don’t want to,” Pete said honestly, but the caution did not leave the prince’s face.
“Of course you are. Lift your hand and strike.”
“No!” Porsche spoke up again. “He’s done nothing to hurt us!”
“But he can and will!” Kinn shot back.
“Are you alright?” Vegas asked. The prince looked worried. “You seem far away.”
“I-” Pete struggled to find the words. “I don’t know.” He ran his armored hand through his hair, letting
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to make a choice, Vegas,” Pete said. “It’s the world or you. Or I’ve been told it’s you or the world– and I’m starting to have doubts.”
“I’m glad,” Vegas said, relaxing. He looked at Pete like he was trying to read his mind. “Who told you it was me or the world?”
“It’s going to sound insane.”
Vegas raised his arm, setting off a long clanging as the iron chains moved with him. “Not much more insane than this.”
Pete gave a self-deprecating smirk. Vegas was right. How was one man, chained in a basement no less , going to end the entire world? If he had that kind of power, wouldn’t he have freed himself long ago?
“If I need to take matters into my own hands, I will.”
“I-”
“You raise your hand with the blade.”
To Pete’s horror, his hand lifts the blade into the air. “No!” he shouted, struggling against the loss of control. His hand just hovers there, poised to strike.
“This is for the greater good!” Kinn protested. “I can only do so much, you must be the one to strike!
The prince looked at Pete, horrified, and then looked at the dagger poised in his hand. “Pete? Pete, what’s happening?”
Pete grabbed his right arm with his left, trying to pull it down. It was as if it was frozen there. Vegas looked sick, eyes flickering back and forth from the struggling Pete and his now autonomous arm. “I don’t think this is you,” Vegas said quietly. “And I’m sorry, Pete, but I don’t want to die.”
Pete barely had a moment to think before Vegas leaped at him.
Grabbing Pete’s arm, the prince wrestled Pete to the floor, pinning Pete under him. He looked wilder in the beam of light from the window now; a creature refusing to die, refusing to be slain.
“Please, don’t make me-” Pete started but was cut off by a sickening sound of flesh split open. The dagger was embedded in the prince’s chest. Vegas looked down at where the blade was stuck between his ribs, and then back to Pete’s eyes. A look of fury filled his face for a split second before his eyes went blank and he slumped forward.
The prince was slain.
Pete gasped for air, the weight of both the prince and his murder suddenly crushing his chest. His once gleaming armor glowed red with blood in the dying sun and the corpse of the prince slowly slid off him as Pete dropped the dagger. He was still bleeding, so much blood that mixed with the dirt floor into a horrible rust-tinted mud.
“Finally. It is done.”
“It’s done? It’s done?” Pete said, panic starting to pitch his voice. He went to push his bangs from his face but saw the red soaking his gauntlets. He took them off, throwing them to the other side of the room.
“Now, Pete, he attacked you. Clearly he-”
“He was defending himself! He asked me to talk to him and you forced me to kill him! He didn’t even have a weapon to defend himself,” Pete felt sick. “What have I done? What have you made me do?”
“He’s made us murderers. That wasn’t an honorable fight,” Porsche said, somber.
“I did what was necessary to save the world, or have you forgotten why we even came here?” Kinn said, clearly annoyed that his efforts weren’t appreciated.
Pete looked over at the prince. His eyes were still open, still blank, still staring at Pete. Pete reached over, closing Vegas’ eyes. He wanted to brush the hair back from Vegas’ face, but his hand trembled when he reached out again. He struggled to his feet. “I…I can’t be here.”
“No reason to be; we’ve completed our task.”
Pete walked to the stairs as quickly as possible.
“You walk to the stairs, heading up to the door and a world saved from desolation.”
“Yeah, you can stop that. Don’t think he wants you puppeting him anymore.”
“I accept that you don’t understand why I had to act, but you must accept that was for the greater good.”
Was taking a life always this numbing? Pete didn’t know what to feel, how to feel, if he even wanted to feel, and as he made his way up the stairs, Kinn and Porsche bickering again, he couldn’t feel anything as the prince’s final moments replayed in his mind. He crossed the small room above and through open the cabin door, ready to see the dying sunlight and trudge forward in hopes of some purpose and clarity.
But the world had gone dark.
“What…is this?” Pete asked. It wasn’t as if night had descended the world was just darkness. There was nothing to be seen; it was as if everything beyond the cabin was a void.
“A world saved,” Kinn said proudly.
“Saved? Saved from what, the world is gone!”
Pete stuck his foot out into the darkness to test it. It did not disappear, and when he stepped down he found solid footing. He took a few steps into the void.
“You’ve saved the world from certain doom and…” fading, as if melting into the distance, Kinn's voice slowly disappeared.
“ Did he just leave us? Did that murderous bastard really leave us here?” Porsche asked, more horrified than angry. Pete continued to walk forward through the void. The cabin faded into the distance behind them as if it never existed.
“Do you think it was the right thing to do?” Pete asked, breaking their silence after what could have been minutes and felt like decades.
“ I think we did as well as we could, given the circumstances. But sure enough, given the chance, I wouldn’t listen to that oily bastard again.”
Pete nodded thoughtfully. “In another life, then.”
“In another life, my friend.”
One foot after another. One step into the expanse after another step. Pete wondered when his body would get tired enough to fail. Would it be at the end of the void? Would he find some shelter, some hope at the end of this?
In the distance, Pete saw a shape. It was round and pale.
“What’s that?” Pete asked out loud. Porsche didn’t answer.
“Porsche?” Nothing.
Well. At the end of everything with no voice left in his head, blood covering his chest, and a mysterious shape in the distance? This was just perfect. Pete continued to walk to the shape. As he got closer, he realized it was a ball of some sort, and it was huge. When he finally stood in front of it, it was at least 3 times his height. It was a huge spiked ball, white with quills all over. Pete reached out and touched the ball, and it trembled. It uncoiled at the center, and a… snout? A narrow snout with a twitching nose and comparatively tiny teeth stuck out from the slightly uncoiled ball. Suddenly, Pete realized what he was looking at.
“You’re…a hedgehog!” Pete laughed at the absurdity of the situation. “A giant hedgehog!”
“Am I?” the hedgehog asked, and Pete startled back a step. It had answered in the voice of the prince. Vegas.
“Are…you the prince?”
“Maybe,” the hedgehog said, nose still sniffing the air. “I remember being the prince. I remember dying. But I also remember being the prince and not dying. It’s all…the memory is not enough. I’m not enough. I don’t know what I am. But you…you feel familiar. More familiar than those memories.”
A warmth spread through Pete’s chest. “You feel familiar, too. I don’t understand it, but you feel more real than anything else.”
“Pete, I feel incomplete,” the hedgehog said. “You brought me a piece of myself, that prince. Could you do it again?”
“What, kill him- you- him again?” Pete said, horrified.
The hedgehog seemed to nod. “Yes. Or maybe let me die? Him die. Me die. I feel there are other pieces of me, Pete. There are other princes. Could you bring them to me?”
Pete looks down at his armor, still red with blood. “I don’t want to kill again.”
“I’m sorry, but how else will you bring them to me?”
Pete thought for a moment. It seemed that, once he exited the cabin again, he had entered this…void. Maybe he could just bring the prince out of the cabin, into the void? He could be a hero rather than a murderer. “I will bring them here, to you,” Pete said. “No murder, no killing.
“Thank you, Pete.”
The dark began to shift, like a living thing. Losing his balance, Pete tumbled and fell into a neverending darkness.