And Mumm-Ra? He was there, and then he wasn’t. The sun did not destroy him. It simply forgot him. And to a being made of ancient curses and remembered grudges, to be forgotten was a fate worse than any death. They emerged from the ruins of the spire into a world washed clean. The tower-ships had fallen, their crews fleeing or surrendering. The mutants, freed from Mumm-Ra’s command, looked at their hands as if seeing them for the first time. The Dog City sent an envoy with food. The Berbils offered to help rebuild the Cat’s Ledge.
“What are you doing?” Mumm-Ra hissed, raising both hands. Black lightning gathered.
“You stabbed yourself,” she said finally. thundercats
“NO! I am eternal! I am—”
“I’m not asking you to take a wrong step. I’m asking you to take us to the spire’s core. From the inside.” And Mumm-Ra
“And fifty mutants guarding it,” Panthro grunted from where he was trying to weld a cracked gauntlet with a melted spoon. “We tried that two moons ago. Remember? When Lynx-O lost his other eye?”
“You are alone,” Lion-O said, and pulled the sword from his chest. It simply forgot him
“You came to break the siphon,” Mumm-Ra continued, walking through the air as if on stairs. “Admirable. But the siphon is the sun, Lion-O. The Plundered Sun is Third Earth’s own heart. I didn’t steal it. I simply convinced it to hate you. Every beam of that poisoned light carries a thought: The ThunderCats do not belong here. They are invaders. They are plague. And the world believes it. That’s why your sword died. That’s why your friends are dying. Because Third Earth no longer wants you.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Panthro set down his useless welding tool and laughed—a dry, broken sound. “Finally. A plan stupid enough to work.” They left at false dawn, when the copper sky turned the color of old blood. Cheetara led them through a fissure behind a dead waterfall, into a labyrinth of hexagonal passages that hummed with a frequency that made Lion-O’s teeth ache. The Spirit Passage was not a place. It was a memory of a place, flickering between geometries. At one point, WilyKit screamed—she’d seen herself as an old woman, standing at the far end of a corridor that hadn’t been there a second ago.
“Don’t look at the walls,” Cheetara hissed. “Look only at my feet.”
A painful silence. Lynx-O, their blind seer, had given his remaining eye—the prosthetic one—to power their life-support. He sat now in the deepest corner, seeing nothing, saying less.