Prophecy Approved Companion

This time Qube gave in to the impulse dragging her into the throne room. She didn't know what she was going to say to the Evil Emperor, but that didn't matter anymore.

As she walked into the room, she was startled by how loudly her footsteps echoed. The purple lights didn't spring up, leaving the whole area in shadowy darkness.

The other party members clustered around the doorway, waiting to see what would happen. Noticing the lack of lights, the Chosen One took a step into the room, just enough to cause the first set to activate.

Qube stood in front of the Evil Emperor, still surrounded by fearless chickens. He looked at her, his eyes pools of darkness.

Countless sentences tried to fight their way out of Qube at once.

He'd killed her friends. Did he regret it?

He'd failed to kill her. Was he glad?

How many people had he killed?

Why had he taken over the kingdom?

Why was he so Evil?

Why wasn't he saying anything?

Why did he want to talk to her in particular?

Why, why, why.

"Did you have a choice?" was all she asked. Even asking that took everything she had.

The man before her said nothing.

Something inside her snapped.

"Did they force you to do it?" she nearly shouted. "Did you fight it? Did you even understand what was happening?"

There was a terrible rage within her, too great for her to control.

So instead she channelled it.

"We've come to defeat you," she said, startled at how cold she sounded. "And restore the King and Queen to power. You can choose to go peacefully, or you will be defeated."

It was a giant bluff. They didn't have the gems. He must have known that, given he was wearing the ones still connected to the guardians.

He still didn't respond. Instead his eyes seemed to burn into hers. Reluctantly, she took a step forward. Would he suddenly snap and try to attack her, like he had with the others? What would happen if his sword finally managed to do what it had failed at all that time ago?

She swallowed her fears, and held onto the strength of her anger. She needed to find a way to force him into giving up, without them having to rely on the gems.

"You've tried to kill me before and failed," she said, her voice barely quivering. "You've tasted my power. You know the world is not what it seems. Surrender."

She didn't know what she'd do if he actually surrendered, but she did know that there was absolutely no chance of that happening. Her asking was merely a formality. After all, this was the ruthless dictator who'd cut a swathe through the kingdom.

She'd freed him from his mental prison, so his silence and violence towards the others could only mean he was, like the pharaoh, dedicated to his path of Evil.

"Hey…" the Chosen One, sounding genuinely worried, took another step into the room.

"Please stay back," Qube said to her friend.

The Evil Emperor sighed, his whole posture deflating from arrogant ruler into a man defeated. In one fluid movement he stripped off his gem-encrusted gauntlet and flung it at her feet. The chickens followed it.

"You have defeated me, Hero," he said quietly. "I am at your mercy."

…what? What? What?

The Evil Emperor stood up from his throne. Qube instinctively flinched away from him, before using her rage to keep herself in place.

"I am at your mercy,” he repeated. “Slay me, or I shall rise again."

"That doesn't even make any sense!" Qube burst out, unable to help herself. "That's not how mercy works! Mercy would be putting you in the dungeon and making you repair the damage you did! How is killing you a mercy?"

It was hard to tell, given the whole “covered in black and spiky armour” situation, but Qube got the distinct impression that the tyrant was nonplussed by her response.

"Also I'm not the Hero, he is," she said, turning and pointing at the Chosen One. "Don't you even remember? You came to my village and killed all my friends and loved ones and then tried to kill me and said a bunch of stuff to the Chosen One and you—you killed everyone and you're telling me that you can't even remember which one of us is the Hero?"

She was nearly incandescent with anger.

"And now you have the—the unmitigated gall to demand we slay you or else you'll continue your reign of terror?"

Qube had thought a lot about how her confrontation with the most Evil man in the kingdom would go. But none of those scenarios had involved her towering over a kneeling Evil Emperor and yelling at him.

Well, maybe one or two scenarios. But the majority had definitely not gone down like this.

"You don't get to say that!" she shouted at the fearsome tyrant. "You apologise right now for what you've done and you find a way to make it right!"

The Evil Emperor finally looked up, and she recoiled from the naked despair she saw on his shadowed face.

"You have defeated me, Hero," he whispered, his voice somehow echoing around the room. The gauntlet glittered on the floor before him. "I am at your mercy."

Ah. She remembered how, even when suffering First Exposure to Chosen One, he'd barely skipped a beat. How tightly controlled his actions had been each time they'd met him, where even looking at her had seemed to take a tremendous effort from him.

She recognised, all too well, the strain of fighting against what you were meant to say, and what you wanted to.

"Is that what you're supposed to say when the Chosen One wins in his fight against you?" she asked with a gentleness that would have surprised anyone hearing her shouting mere moments earlier.

The Evil Emperor lowered his head, staring at the floor. He remained silent.

"I see," she said at last. "So, you didn't have a choice," she said quietly.

He continued to keep his head down.

"Right? Tell me, please," she said, polite even in her despair. "I need to know. I can't… I can't forgive you if I don't know."

She didn't know if she could forgive him, even if he had been forced into it.

The Emperor was silent.

"He probably can't answer," the Chosen One said gently from behind her. "Given how powerful he is, they wouldn't want him saying or doing anything wrong."

"I [Heal]ed you," said Qube, temporarily putting aside the Chosen One’s words. "Surely that gave you a little freedom?"

It was hard to think between the rage howling within her, and the rope around her soul nearly tearing her apart in its attempts to draw her deeper into the room, but she held on as hard as she could.

The un-gauntleted hand resting on the Evil Emperor's knee flexed, the scars on the exposed flesh straining at the movement.

"They wept as they died, Hero," he said, sounding almost lost.

Suddenly he smashed his hand into the ground.

"Your whole village was lost, false Hero! And you cannot land a single blow on me? Perhaps I should have made them suffer more."

Qube hated the Evil Emperor more than she'd ever hated anyone in her life. But she still crouched down next to him.

"But that wasn't your fault, was it?" she asked him gently.

"My gems have failed! My fate is sealed!" the Emperor said in despair.

"Is throwing your gauntlet on the ground what you're supposed to do?" Qube repeated her earlier question. He had to be following a narrative, to throw away such a powerful weapon in the face of those who had just cause to want to kill him.

He dragged his gaze up to her face. “I took your companion, Hero, but it seems that wasn’t enough to motivate you. Strike me!” He swallowed, and something shifted on his face. His eyes studied her eyes, as if trying to solve an impossible puzzle.

"You…" he said and his voice cracked, the booming baritone falling away and leaving only a broken, frightened man, straining to speak words outside his script. "You haunt me."

Blood dripped from his fist.

"I can't haunt you. You didn't kill me," Qube replied. It took all her kindness, every ounce of her compassion, to reach out and lightly place the tips of her fingers on the back of his bleeding hand.

But she did it.

"[Heal]," she said.

The Evil Emperor closed his eyes and shuddered as her spell took effect, her silvery mana sinking into his damaged flesh. A part of Qube had been afraid that she would immediately die if she made physical contact with the Evil Emperor. But, whether it was her touch or the second round of [Heal]ing, he seemed more at peace.

When he finally reopened his eyes, he looked directly at her, and she saw that some of the restrictions had eased.

“I took your head,” he whispered.

“You didn’t,” Qube reassured him. She pointed at her face. “See? My head’s right here.”

“I've killed so many people,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I did so many terrible things.”

“But that wasn’t your choice, was it?” Qube asked gently. She didn’t know why it was so important to her, that he admitted he hadn’t wanted to do all those Evil deeds.

“I enjoyed killing them,” he confessed. “Their deaths… the memories of them, they’re inside me.” There was a beat before he continued: “Those memories will never leave me. That joy… was stripped away. By you. But the memory of it remains.”

He struggled to speak, the words clearly costing him dearly.

“Having a choice or not, I still committed these acts. And I… don’t want to live with them inside me.”

He reached out with his bare hand, and ghosted his fingers along the side of Qube’s face.

“So I make this: my first, and last choice. Kill me, Healer, and release me from my memories. Grant me your mercy.”

Qube blinked at him. His hand dropped, returning to his side.

“Oh boy,” she heard the Chosen One mutter from behind her. She turned her head, and saw his face, now slightly pale. He looked back at her.

“If you want, I can… y’know. Do it for you,” the Hero offered.

And if it had been the Chosen One facing the Evil Emperor, he would have granted the man his requested freedom. Any of the other party members would have probably done the same. It would have been a merciful thing to do, considering.

But this was Qube.

And she had her own way of doing things.

“No,” she told the Chosen One. Then she turned and looked at the man she was crouched next to. “And no to you too,” she said sharply.

The Evil Emperor looked at her in resignation.

“I understand I don’t deserve your compassion…” he started.

“Compassion? Of course you get my compassion!” Qube said indignantly. “But I’m not going to kill anyone, nor let anyone else get killed on my watch.”

She stood up, and grabbed the Evil Emperor’s bicep.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked the tyrant as she dragged the massive man to his feet. “You’re so used to destroying everything, it’s the only way you know how to solve anything.”

Having successfully bullied the Evil Emperor into standing up, she dusted off her hands, before jabbing a finger into his armoured chest.

“A terrible thing happened to you,” she said sternly. “You were used to do terrible things, and worse, you were forced to enjoy it. I don’t argue that. But dying isn’t how you fix it.”

She drew herself upright and glared as hard as she could at the much taller man.

“You’ve wounded someone. Is the solution to that to injure yourself, because you feel bad? Or is it to try and heal them?”

She jabbed him in the chest again, harder. It made her finger hurt, but she wanted to get her point across.

“You damaged something, so you have to fix it. If you can’t fix it, you make it so other people don’t cause the same kind of damage. You repair, not despair.” She paused, taken out of the moment by how pleased she was at her little rhyme. No, focus! “As you repair the damage you were forced to do, we go to the people who made you do it, and demand they repair the damage they did to you, and others through you.”

She crossed her arms across her chest and nodded. “So no, you won’t be dying. Instead, you’re going to get to work.”

The Evil Emperor, who’d been staring down at Qube with the kind of baffled puzzlement normally directed at the Chosen One, looked at the Hero over her head.

“She…” he said, then gave up.

“I know,” the Chosen One replied, stepping deeper into the throne room. "You kinda get used to it." As he walked, more purple flames sprang up, until the whole room was bathed in its eerie light. When he reached Qube’s side, he bent and picked up the gauntlet.

The instant his hand made contact with the gauntlet, Qube suddenly swayed. She blinked, trying to clear the dizziness that had just overcome her.

The Chosen One smiled down at Qube, who was surprised to find herself shaking, almost sweating. He put his hand on her shoulder, but before he could speak, they were interrupted by a thin, reedy voice from behind the throne.

“You,” it said reverently. “You came!”