Author's Note:

Well, this one snowballed as well, as I got towards the end. Many hundreds of words over my self-imposed wordcount.
Sorry. It's a bit of a cra-a-a-azy rollercoaster as well.
Anyway... it's finished, now. So review it! Especially you mysterious people who ghost in my Reader Traffic stats, from Bulgaria and Japan and France-land (and, of course, the mountain of anonymous USA-sians). Don't make poor old STaR Productions and azngirlchibi do ALL the work penning me big long reviews. ;)

Much thanks to EVERYONE who has given me feedback over the course of this venture; Ri2, Feniiku, Ryan Duran, Awdures, Authorized, and the aforementioned. I could have done it without you, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fun. :)
Everyone else; it's not to late! Repent your sins, and review, lest the Eggrobos burn you for your blasphemy!

Day 431: MY 11.031

A black hedgehog staggered down the passageway, legs weak, breathing ragged. Crystals glowed gently in the corridor walls; white and purple, white and purple, refracting the strange emanations of the Master Emerald down to visible wavelengths. The dark creature stumbled onwards. Lines of red streaked his charcoal fur, barely distinguishable in the dim gem-light.

"Almost there, Sonic… almost there…" panted the young fox who supported him. Tails, like his elder brother, sported fur as black as night. Burns and cuts crowded every inch of the kit's weary form; one of his tails hung limp and motionless behind him, dragging through the ashen rubble. He couldn't feel the thing at all; and he was glad. The rest of him hurt so badly already…

And he had gotten off lightly. Sonic… Sonic was hurt bad. Really bad. Tails could feel the red patches in his brother's blackened coat; he could feel their dampness, seeping into the fur of his own shoulders. He struggled to keep the hedgehog upright, struggled to keep them both moving forward.

It had been Eggman. The Death Egg's main cannons, at maximum output, had the power to reduce a planet to slag – or so the Doctor had bragged, back in Hilltop Zone, what seemed like an eternity ago. And he had fired them inside the volcano, aiming for just two Mobians. Two. And even after that, even with his fur smouldering in the heat, Sonic had fought their old enemy once again, as Robotnik toyed with the lava flow beneath them.

Sonic coughed, weakly; although, in his condition, it was more of a long-drawn out wheeze. Tails could have sworn he saw smoke trailing out from the corner of the hedgehog's mouth.

The fox shuffled onwards. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, soft and gold, and spinning.

Sonic breathed in, and out, the way he had taught Tails. Stay calm; just breathe. In… and out. It was a simple thing, but it helped clear the mind. Sonic didn't want to remember it; remember brushing a hand through his own coat, and watching the blackened fur fall out. The Death Egg's cannons were neither quick nor clean weapons. Not by a long shot.

Sonic shook his head violently; both to derail the morbid train of thought, and to slough off the few burnt strands still lodged in his revitalised blue pelt. His saviour was doing the same; dusting the charred fur out of his tails, revealing the white tips underneath. Grinning, Sonic messed the hair on the top of Tails' head, dislodging a shower of soot.

"You okay, lil' dude? All your tails where they're supposed to be?" the hedgehog asked. With childish diligence, the fox traced them back to the base of his spine, delivering a forceful thumbs-up and a matching smirk to his friend after he confirmed that yes, they were both still attached.

"All here, all working, Sonic!" he replied. By means of demonstration, the kit somersaulted into the air, and, with a whirl of his tails, he was aloft, bourn upwards by their blurred rotation.

Being able to fly again was awesome. In the tunnels of Lava Reef, and the pyramids of Sandopolis, his tails had been relegated to fan duty; besides, claustrophobic underground passageways didn't really leave much room for taking off. But now… Tails laughed as he kicked his feet, just to prove they weren't touching anything. He had never gotten over how cool flying was; not that his bro would let him forget. Since they'd been on the Floating Island, he was getting stronger at it, as well; he could even haul Sonic up with him, for a little while.

"How's the weather up there, Tails?" the hedgehog yelled, barely audible over the vertical distance, and the thumpthumpthump of the fox's rotors. "See anything interesting?"

That was an understatement.
"Radical," the fox breathed to himself. The cavern was enormous, yawning dark and silent around him. Directly below was Sonic, and the broken circle of rings they'd been standing in. Further out, there were ruins; collapsed pillars, and the remnants of buildings clad in jade and precious stones. And over it all, a verdigris glow, coming from somewhere Tails couldn't quite see.

"The floor's all covered with pictures!" he shouted, turning his head back to Sonic. "And there's something glowi-"

The echidna came out of nowhere. He slammed into Tails bodily, knocking the kit right out of the sky. They tumbled together, as they fell; a blur of red and orange and fur and fists. Knuckles was punching, the entire time, at the fox's head, his legs, and his chest.
He didn't have the slightest shred of mercy for this kid, as he felt young bones snap under the barrage. That, he had learnt in Carnival Night, from the Doctor: remorseless.
For whatever reason, the fox had chosen his path.
And now, he was going to die for it.

They hit the floor with crushing force, ploughing straight through the brittle mortar of a minor fresco. Dust and shattered tiles exploded outwards, the muted thud of impact ringing out across the silent expanse of the Hidden Palace. Mosaic pieces bounced across the ground like ceramic rainfall, and then, everything was still again.

Except for Sonic. Surprise and horror had paralysed him for a full second, but then, he was there, at the edge of the dust-filled pit. The hedgehog's eyes scanned desperately, searching through the cloud of grains for some sign of… of either of them.

There. Orange. Tails! As if sensing his urgency, the dust cleared out of the air just enough for Sonic to make out the fox's beaten form. There was blood in the kid's fur… but he was breathing. The hedgehog felt relief flooding into him as Tails' chest rose and fell. He was okay. But where was-

Knuckles burst out of the ground right beneath him, torrents of dirt and sand cascading through his dishevelled dreads. He burrowed! was all Sonic had chance to think, before the echidna smashed his face with a furious uppercut. The blue creature felt something fracture in his jaw, and then he was in the air. Knuckles' punch threw him in an arcing parabola; over Tails' hole, over the shattered mosaic, over a row of broken pillars. Sonic could see Robotnik's face in the Death Egg, crashed atop the mouth of the volcano, as his trajectory peaked. And then the floor, approaching quite rapidly…

Knuckles' expression didn't change, as he watched the hedgehog sail away through the green-tinted air. It didn't change when the hedgehog landed, perfectly, his red sneakers soaking up the momentum of impact, and springing the murderous blue creature back, towards him. It didn't change as he raised his fists, watching Sonic tear across the distance, coloured shards and dust billowing in his slipstream as he ran.

It was an expression of hatred.

He was here. He was here, at the final sanctum. An uninvited outsider was itself a terrible blasphemy in this holy chamber; but Sonic? The one who had killed so many, down on the surface; who had destroyed so much, once he got here. The one who struck terror into the heart of Knuckles' only companions, the Emerald and the Doctor; the one who now sought to take both of them away from him.

Still a hundred metres away, Sonic leapt. The Guardian allowed his wrathful grimace to change, fractionally, towards a quirk of a smile. It was exactly what he'd expected the hedgehog to do. As the interloper curled himself up into a spinning ball of spikes and sharpness, his visibility would reduce phenomenally – long enough for Knuckles to give him a taste of his own medicine.

His boots, a home-made patchwork of clownish, clashing colours, weren't tailored to this technique, as were his opponents; but their serrated climbing grip was all he needed. The echidna curled as well; and span. And span. And span.

He didn't have all frictionless quills Sonic used for this, either; but Knuckles made it work, twitching his dreadlocks just as he did for gliding, letting the air spiral around him, a self-reinforcing dynamo of circular momentum. The Guardian cycled up – to turbo speed.

The tiles fractured under Knuckles' spinning form, as the hedgehog cannoned into him. But Sonic had nothing to soak up his momentum; the blue sphere ricocheted off its sanguine counterpart. In midair, Sonic uncurled, shocked, desperate to see what had happened. The echidna had just turboed him? Used his move?

The hedgehog landed, and then, the Guardian was on him again, charging forward, fist drawn back, violet eyes blazing with fanatical hatred. But Sonic was faster; Sonic was always faster. He ducked away from the incoming blow, and his hand caught Knuckles' outstretched forearm. The echidna twisted, attempting to maintain his balance, but the blue hero was ready for it. While the Guardian certainly had the edge in power, Sonic was no slouch either. Drawing his free hand back, the hedgehog smashed his fist square into the white crescent on Knuckles' chest.

It almost broke his wrist.

Punching the echidna was like punching a wall. Knuckles simply grunted; and, from the look in his eyes, it was less a sound of pain than of amusement. Sonic tried to draw his injured hand back, but the Guardian had anticipated his reflex. Shrugging off the hedgehog's hold, Knuckles lashed out, and grabbed the hand in his own glove.
And squeezed.

The hedgehog's howl of agony echoed off the viridian surfaces of the palace. It was exceptionally satisfying sound. Tightening his grip, the echidna felt bones in Sonic's fist pop out of position. He smiled sadistically, watching the colour drain out of his opponent's face.
"Do not toy with them," Ivo had instructed. "The moment you get the chance: kill them. Kill them both." But surely his mentor wouldn't begrudge him a lit-

The fox rammed into his side, with far more force than Knuckles would have thought him capable. Sonic was snatched out of his grip, as Tails' lightning assault sent the two of them rolling across the mosaic floor, an entangled ball of combat. Together, they slammed into the jade steps of the Emerald chamber. Knuckles yelled as the creature sank his teeth into a dreadlock. Fighting back, the Guardian kicked Tails in the ribs, once, twice, three times, making sure to strike in the same positions he'd punched earlier, to maximise the pain inflicted. Eventually, the fox released him; Tails' fangs were soaked with blood, though whether it was his or the echidna's, Knuckles couldn't tell. Probably both.

Risking a glance over his shoulder, the Guardian saw that Sonic was down, courtesy of five mangled digits Knuckles had left inside the hedgehog's bloodstained glove. But he couldn't rely on him to stay there for long. He had to deal with Tails quickly. And permanently.

"Robotnik's... been lying... to you" the kit wheezed. It was, Knuckles realised, the first time any of them had spoken during the fight. But they had been through all this before, from Angel Island to Lava Reef; over and over. The echidna was tired of their arguments.

So, by way of response, he smashed Tails' head against the steps.
The fox made a visceral, raging noise, and lashed out. Knuckles parried the blow easily, and bashed his opponent into the jade surface again. "I'm not here to reason with you," he hissed, looking straight into Tails' terrified eyes. "I'm here to kill you." One more smash would break the thief's skull like an egg.

But then...
Knuckles roared, his hands flying from Tails' head to claw at his own ears. The Guardian's vision swam, and his fingers jerked involuntarily, their nerves firing wildly.
All his life, he had never been more than a few kilometres from the Master Emerald, and the Palace's control plinth. He could feel the gem, in his head; nothing so fanciful as telepathy, but the synapses in his brain were attuned to its signals. The benign radiation that washed out of the crystal was as much a part of him as his own beating heart.

It had just stopped.
After four hundred and thirty-one days, Robotnik had made his move.

Sonic forced himself back to his feet. He was trying very, very hard not to look at the end of his arm. The glove was completely red with blood; and it felt like the cloth was the only thing keeping his hand together.
But he'd survived worse.
Hadn't he?

All of a sudden, something shifted in the light. The green tint in the air changed, fractionally; a sickly, darker hue. But… maybe… maybe that was just the nausea talking…
Through a haze of pain, the hedgehog focused on the steps where Knuckles and Tails were fighting. Pixel-brain must have done something; the red maniac was clutching his head, eyes screwed up. Taking his chance, Sonic advanced.

And Knuckles threw Tails at him.

The hedgehog tried to catch his brother as best he could, one-handed, but it was a doomed effort; the two friends still landed in an entangled heap. Sonic was up first, anticipating an attack. Instead, he saw Knuckles running up the steps where he'd just tried to brain Tails. Sonic didn't intend to let him get away; not again. Beside him, the fox jumped to his feet.

"You cool, buddy?" the hedgehog asked. Tails' scalp was caked with blood, and he was blinking far more often than a healthy creature should. But the kit's jaw was set, determined; his eyes focused on the retreating echidna, with feral intensity.
Tails nodded.

They ran towards the Emerald chamber.

No! NO!

It took Knuckles a few seconds to recognise that the voice screaming in his head was in his ears as well. It was his own. The echidna didn't want to process, didn't want to accept, what was happening.

He was clinging to the Master Emerald.
And it wasn't on the altar.

That in itself would have been inconceivable. The gem had not moved from that plinth for four thousand years; it… it kept the Island afloat! Preventing the separation of Emerald and altar was the entire purpose of the Guardian; the entire purpose of his life.

And it wasn't Sonic's doing. It was Ivo.

The Egg-O-Matic sprouted a huge, orange claw from its underbelly; hydraulic compressors shielded under plasma-steel plating. The grapples clasped the Master Emerald, and secondary crystals adhered to its surface, broken shards wrenched away from the plinth's interface. Knuckles snatched at them, desperate for handholds; the Emerald itself was almost impossible to grip.

He was climbing up the holy jewel, climbing towards his erstwhile friend and tutor. 'It could just be a mistake! He could be trying to keep it from Sonic!' a part of him clamoured. But it wasn't a mistake. Knuckles knew this with crushing certainty. He could see it in the Doctor's face, as he wrestled with the controls mere metres above him.

This was what he had planned all along.

"Ah, the Guardian finally makes his appearance." Robotnik mocked, peering over the side of his floating machine as he compensated for the Emerald's pseudo-mass. The scientist's moustache twitched when he caught sight of Sonic and Tails, hurrying into the Emerald chamber.
"You didn't kill either of them?" Ivo hissed, all amusement dropped from his tone. "Why did I bother chasing them here, then?"

The Eggman toggled switches on his control panel, shaking his head with casual coolness. "Echidna, I can't say I'm particularly impressed with your performance. You've failed your wards, you've failed your ancestors, you've failed as a Guardian; but now you've failed me."

Sonic had been holding back, physically holding Tails back, to see how this would play out. They couldn't take on Lard-Bucket and his lieutenant at the same time; not in their condition. But it looked like the Doctor was finally showing his true colours to the echidna. He yelled a warning to Knuckles, as metallic tendrils snaked out of the Egg-O-Matic's sides. But the Guardian wasn't paying any attention to him.

"WHY!?" Knuckles roared. His face was a picture of anguish, riven by pain and incredulity, tears carving tracks through the dust and dried blood around his eyes. And again, quieter. Begging. "Why?"

Robotnik leaned back over the side of the pod, to meet Knuckles' eyes once again. The scientist shook his head. There was no mockery in the gesture, this time. He actually looked… disappointed.
"You're as blind as the hedgehog, if you need to ask me that question," Ivo sighed. "After all this time, still, you do not understand who I am."

The Doctor flipped a switch, and the electro-polarizability tendrils crackled to life.

Day 432: MY 11.032

One moment, the jade and jewels of Hidden Palace Zone; the next, Tails was falling face-first towards yellowed, moss-covered stones. The Echidnean teleporters, according to Sonic, were a lot less unpleasant than Robotnik's; the fox couldn't see how that was possible, as he landed on cracked stones. His fractured ribs screamed at him; blood trickled out of the kit's mouth, and the wound in the side of his head, staining the lichen an angry red.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the fox turned his body sideways on the floor, to be greeted by a void of blue. They were above the clouds, even higher than the rest of the Floating Island. Dawn etched a billowing cloudscape with golden light, reflecting off ice crystals and… other, more sinister things.

The Death Egg rose through the blanket of haze, wisps of moisture clawing at the dark steel of its immense hull. It was as though the sky itself was desperately trying to prevent the Doctor's escape, vainly attempting to pull back the huge sphere of metal, and the stolen Master Emerald.

Voices, behind him.

Sonic, angry. "…see?! Everything, everything he told you was a lie. We've never seen another like you, and I certainly didn't slaughter any village! We don't want the Master Emerald! Just tell us which way to go! We'll stop him; we'll bring it back!"

"No you won't." That was Knuckles. The echidna hadn't spoken to them, after Robotnik's betrayal. They had simply followed him, the three of them limping through maze-like passageways under Hidden Palace.
"You can't take it from him. He's already launched. And even if you could, you wouldn't give it back." He sounded tired. Almost as tired as Tails felt. That moss looked very inviting… comfortable…

Sonic growled with frustration. "How can just one guy be this stupid? Even if you believe that, even if you still think we want to steal it; would you really prefer that Eggman has the Emerald? From your point of view, Knucklehead, it's us or him."

Silence.

"Aren't you supposed to be the Guardian, or something? He's getting away!"

More silence. And then:

"Destroy him." Spoken quietly.
"Destroy him. Burn his home, erase his tribe, tear down everything he's ever built. His friends, his family… make… him…"
Knuckles' voice trailed off. His words were hollow; it sounded like he was saying them only because he felt he had to.

"No can do, Red." Sonic replied. "Didn't the fat guy tell you? There aren't any other hoo-mans down there. He's the only one of his kind."

No reply. Tails was still watching the Death Egg rise, with casual disregard for gravity. Tiny lights flared at its equator, as the Eggrobos launched.

Sonic saw them too. Leaving Knuckles to deal with his shock on his own time, Sonic jogged over to where Tails lay, and hefted the kit up with his one good hand. The other one still hung useless, a soggy pulp of blood and fabric.

"Come on, buddy," he said, supporting Tails as the fox's feet dragged along the ground. "No-one ever taught Sonic the Hedgehog when it was time to give up."

Day 546: MY 11.146

"…initially placed as a means of remote detection and absorption of the hyperspatial interstices generated by ring manifestation, the negentropic collimators, or 'lamp-posts', have developed a profound and important secondary application, which has become more and more exploitable as the design has been augmented in latter deployments. Though, in retrospect, detailed analysis of d41/77.9 and Proof 612 in d74/52.2 would have demonstrated the principle: charge it with enough rings, and the lamp-posts open up a gateway to the Special Zones.

The hemi-dimensional worlds thus accessible represent an astonishing variety of pocket universes, promising revolutionary paradigm shifts in the very fundamentals of non-Euclidian topology studies. While the development of manufacturing capacity inside Special Zones is untenable, thanks to the gateway's temperamental nature and prohibitively expensive activation costs, staggering military and computational possibilities might be realized by tapping…"

The recording petered out. Knuckles twisted a dial, the plastic nub blackened and misshapen. Ivo's voice crackled out of the tiny speaker once again.

"…initially placed as a means of remote detection and absorbtion of the hyperspatial interstices genertatd by…"

The Guardian munched on a grapefruit as he listened, and gazed out from his grassy perch onto the verdant, busy canopy of Angel Island Zone. Not everything had perished in the Flying Battery's attack; patches of rainforest had weathered the firestorm, and now vigorous new-growth trees sprouted from the fertile ashes of their predecessors. Animal cries filled the air again, as those creatures once locked inside robotic bodies returned home, and settled back into their jungle niches.

"…activation costs, staggering military and computational possibilities might be realized by tapping..."

Again, Knuckles rewound the recording, and it began anew.
He had lost count of the number of times he'd listened to this piece of junk. The Guardian knew he should really throw it away; cast it back into the rusting scrapheaps of Launch Base or Chrome Gadget or Carnival Night where he'd found it.

The badniks had mostly tidied themselves up, slinking back to the metal Zones, to degrade and die in great huddles of steel. Not all of them, of course; the final Eggrobos had hounded him even after Tails returned the Master Emerald; playing out their higher-level programming as best they could without the Doctor's controlling hand.
But the conventional badniks, those that had been churned out by the thousand from the Island's manufactories… they were lost without their creator and his algorithmic control. They had crawled to the lights, to the metal and the artifice, where their master had lived. Lost children, searching for the Father who never came home.

Knuckles rewound the sound-file again. He, too, was trying to find the Doctor, in the recording. Listening to the man's strange, booming voice; trying to find where his friend ended, and where his betrayer began.

"He's the only one of his kind," the hedgehog had said.
Was that how Robotnik had known, that first day, in the meadow? The flash he'd seen in Knuckles' eyes… had he seen his own emotions reflected in the echidna? The loneliness? The solitude? Was that how he had manipulated him, with such mastery; because he knew first-hand what it felt like, to be the last one?

Everything else might have been lies, but the final words the Doctor had given him, as they spun through the Emerald Chamber - they were entirely accurate.
He truly did not understand who Ivo Robotnik was.
He did understand something, though. The Eggrobos, and Mecha-Sonic; they had hunted him mercilessly, even as the Death Egg exploded, and impossible lights flashed in the sky far, far above. His only friend had tried to kill him; of that, there was no doubt.

But not in the Emerald chamber.

The Doctor had shown him the Egg-O-Matic's control panel, back in the Launch Base lab, that day Knuckles had asked him about his father. Eggman had shown him the very weapons he used to shock the echidna off the great gem. He had shown him that the electric tendrils could blast a creature to atoms, at the mere flick of a switch.

He hadn't done it. He had used a lower yield.
The Doctor had had the chance to kill Knuckles himself.
And he didn't take it.

Maybe he'd feared damaging the Emerald.
Maybe it had been mercy.
Maybe he'd hoped Knuckles would finish Sonic off, even afterwards.
Maybe it had been a final act of spite, to deny the Guardian a noble death.
Maybe he'd wanted to make Knuckles live with his shame, and his failure.

Once more, the echidna rewound the tape. He'd been sat here for hours, just listening. Thinking, like Ivo had told him to do. But now the day was drawing on; it was time to move, check some other Zone of the Island. His old routine had reasserted itself easily, now that he was alone again.

The Defender of Angel Island stood up, and walked away, carrying Ivo's voice with him. Birds cheeped and frogs croaked, as he left; just as they had for four thousand years.