Chapter Text
When the bowman and the princess found Adora, it was in the form of an ancient warrior, sword raised, her teeth bared, ready to fight long enough to let Catra—wherever their glider had taken her—flee.
She-Ra, the bowman called her, eyes wide with awe. He knew what these powers were. A mission laid itself out before her, bold and dangerous: go with them. Learn how to use the weapon she’d stumbled onto. It would change the course of the war, she knew it.
When the pair wasn’t looking, she gouged a quick message into the dense moss of the forest floor. In massive, jagged letters Catra would be able to see from the flier Adora wrote:
I’m safe. Go home. -A
She didn’t intend them to be her last words.
***
Adora had minutes before the princesses caught up. The hallways of Horde Outpost Delta-Four stretched out like a strange mirror of her home, familiar scrap-metal corridors leading to similar but unexpected places. The walls groaned as princess magic flew outside. Otherwise, it was eerily still. All the inhabitants had been drawn to the Plumerian distraction on their perimeter.
“Come on, gotta be here somewhere,” she muttered, jogging out of her second dead end.
The blight in Plumeria was just a toxic leak from some poorly maintained machinery, Adora was sure of it. Half the Horde’s outposts were falling apart, and there were never enough resources for repairs. Adora just needed to follow the ceiling pipes to the outpost’s exhaust port. From there, she could track the waste leak on her own. The appreciative princesses would be sure to spill their secrets then, giving her plenty to report back to Shadow Weaver.
A slender woman, jacket marked with the insignia of a technician, poked her head out as Adora approached. Adora’s hand tightened on the sword, her newly broadened shoulders tensing under the glowing white doublet. The tech backpedaled, slamming the door shut behind her.
Another hallway, another turn. The thrum of machinery was getting louder. There. A massive hexagonal door marked the entrance of the central machine room.
Inside, the source of the spill was much larger and newer than she’d anticipated, a sturdy steel machine with a hollow glass center and rigid tubing running in every direction.
Only it wasn’t malfunctioning.
Vicious green liquid the color of Catra’s left eye roiled away at its center. Bubbles rose to the surface, the gurgling sound of the tube emptying audible behind thick protective glass. A spurt of the fluid washed through the pipes as she watched, pumps humming as they strained to send it a vast distance.
To Plumeria.
Adora sagged out of her battle-ready stance, horrified. This wasn’t an accident, like she’d told the people of Plumeria. It wasn’t a careless leak, or defective machinery a decade overdue for replacement. The Horde was pumping poison directly into princess lands.
When she’d accompanied the princesses, eagerly seeking their dark secrets, Adora hadn’t bargained for the Horde to have its own.
Adora flung herself at the control panels, her eyes scrabbling over the dozens of switches and buttons. There had to be an off switch.
No, wait—turning it off wouldn’t be enough. They’d flip it back as soon as she left. How was the machine disabled?
The wall twenty feet away exploded before she could figure it out, pelting her face and exposed arms with jagged shards. Light streamed through the massive hole, and pulverized concrete hung thickly in the sunlit air.
Perfuma entered with a whooping war cry. She flung her hands out. Plants twined around the machine and pulled. With tortured screeching, the metal gave way. Sludge spilled over as the machine’s tubing cracked and split. It burned sizzling pits into the floor, hissing. Adora leapt back. The rising fumes tickled her lungs.
Perfuma turned her face towards the hole in the outpost wall. Her eyes fell closed.
“Oh. That already feels better,” she said.
Released from the protective glass, the fluid ate away at the machine itself. A klaxon went off, the machine wailing for servicing.
Adora tore rubble from the wreck of the wall, trying to build a barrier that could stem the flow. The liquid kept coming, seeping around her ineffective protections.
More plants forced their way up through the flooring. They formed a circle around the spill, withering as they met the poison. Their dense, blackened coils managed to contain the worst of it.
“This Princess Alliance of yours sounds like a great idea. You know, gardening takes a lot of patience. You have to wait for things to grow in their own time. But you have to plant the seeds you want to cultivate.” Perfuma gave Adora a friendly nod. “I’ll go tell Glimmer.”
And then Adora was alone. She stared at the wreckage, unable to look away. The alarm blared. Her mind hitched and caught, over and over, like a machine missing a cog. She slashed through the klaxon, and the room fell silent.
If the machine had been left on another month, it might’ve completely taken out Perfuma’s powers.
It was tactically sound. Adora felt cold. Strange.
All those Plumerian villagers—who’d never fought, before they’d insisted on accompanying her here—they would have starved, their crops dying from the poisoned soil. Her tactics classes had discussed collateral damage, of course. It’d never occurred to her what a monstrous thing it was.
The heroic form of She-Ra dissipated around her, leaving her nothing more than a teenage girl holding a sword too big for her.
She tore her eyes from the machine, pacing in front of it, giving Perfuma’s plants a wide berth.
The strategy was logical. It was right for the Horde to level the playing field by removing magic. Just look how dangerous Perfuma had been at half her strength.
Fight? Us? the villagers had said. That is not our way.
In her own body, inhaling the fumes burned. The acrid smell mixed with the chalky concrete dust abraded her from the inside out. She felt dizzy.
Voices drifted in from outside, coming closer. Princesses. Adora dove for the sword. To be found now was a death sentence.
The first time, in the woods, the sword changed her when she’d decided to protect Catra from the encroaching princesses. Whatever it took: she had wanted to do whatever it took to make sure Catra escaped.
The voices grew more distinct: Glimmer and Bow were quickly approaching. Adora closed her eyes.
She remembered the way the villagers’ faces had lit up when they saw that someone had come to fight for them. To save them.
Adora wrapped that protectiveness around herself.
“For the honor of Grayskull,” she whispered, and transformed.
“What was that light?” Glimmer said, picking her way through the hole Perfuma had blasted.
“Um. Machinery… did something,” Adora lied. Badly.
“Come on out from there. We should get going before the Horde regroups,” Glimmer said.
“Yeah. Definitely,” Adora said.
She left without looking at the machine again. It was already etched into her memory.
The walk back to Brightmoon gave her a painfully long time to think. After half an hour, the trees blurred together. They might as well have been the same trees they’d passed when Glimmer and Bow marched her to Brightmoon for the first time. Much like then, Adora caught a glimpse of an abandoned settlement between the trunks. The twisted buildings were charred, but not yet overset by plant growth. The damage was fresh.
If you kill enough of a town, the rest don’t want to come back, Glimmer had growled, when Adora asked why the villages they passed were only husks. Adora had focused on the rubble, scanning it for clues, an inch from rolling her eyes. Glimmer’s words were blatant princess propaganda. Clearly the woods were overrun with monsters—or the princesses themselves had raided the villages.
The Horde destroys everything it touches, Glimmer had said. The only thing that stopped Adora from hotly protesting was catching sight of the fabric clenched between Glimmer’s fists.
A Horde banner.
Now, her new and sharper eyes left little room for self-deception: a damaged Horde tank sat on the outskirts of this razed village.
Had the princesses actually lied? Misrepresented what they’d told her? Been fooled by propaganda?
It didn’t seem so. But it was starting to look like the Horde had.
“You don't talk much, do you?” Bow said, bringing Adora back.
It was hard to look at him. The colorful cuts and colors of princess-made clothes made her stomach twist, just this moment. Unsure what to say, or what to do with her hands, she stared at where the dirt-packed road met the horizon.
“Mm.”
“I won’t pester you. But since I’m not sure anyone has said it yet... thank you. Everyone’s lost someone to the Horde. I can’t tell you how much it means that you’re here.”
“I’ll... do my best,” Adora said awkwardly.
Bow nodded, satisfied, and fell back to where Glimmer lagged behind them.
Adora’s breath came fast and sharp, even though there was nothing to fight. She’d inadvertently spoken the truth. What the Horde was doing was wrong. She was She-Ra. Or at least, she had She-Ra’s sword.
She was going to have to try and save everyone for real.