| The End of Time (Dimension <Null>); July 25TH, 3689 A.D. |
“I’m
not your Savanti Romero or anyone else you may foolishly believe,
but very well all the same," the Shogun thundered at his
enemies. "It shall be as you say, Leonardo. It will end here...
and it will end now."
For several moments, the six Turtles and Renet Tilley stood against the Shogun, their bodies poised, their muscles supple, and their weapons at full readiness.
Renet took a place next to Leo. This chaotic trip had all started when the Council of the 79TH was slain—elders she had thought of as her family since she was a little girl—but she certainly didn’t want it to end with the death of the Turtles’ remaining world... and their Master.
"If there’s going to be any sort of ending here, I must insist it be a good one." She held her eyes steady on the Shogun’s shadowy presence. Just how he forebodingly perched himself on the rocky ledge of the volcano’s crater looked quite absurd from his previous appearance in the Palisade.
"Of course it will be. My intentions are to create a world—an entire existence that will become the one true reality—that is void of wrong," he rumbled with a deep, empty laughter. "Yes, a utopia. I have seen reality as I knew it from a thousand perspectives. If you could only see the things I have seen! I know with every fiber of my being what must be done to... rectify things—the alternate dimensions were the key. A little of that one, a dab of this one... the one, true, only perfect reality. According to the Bible it took God a matter of days to create our Earth... I can do better." His grimly faceted eyes looked past to the others, then back to Renet. "But yet, they will blame you for the death of their Master. Do you not see how my future changes?"
Renet’s eyes narrowed and she stole a glance from Leo.
"How dare you say that! Christ, you’re the one who’s killing everything—everyone!" Leo shouted at the Shogun. "Renet told us we were here to stop you from destroying our dimension."
The Shogun continued to laugh. "It has already begun. Can you not feel the losses? It is the dissolution of eternity... at the righteousness of my very fingertips."
"What if he’s sayin’s right..." Raphael growled low his opinion. "Fuck... she found the time to save those two weirdos from who knows where, but not Splinter?!"
Slash shot Raphael a glance and proceeded to draw his only sai.
Don stepped between the two. "I invited him to come, Raph!"
Raph sneered, curling his lips into a snarl. "And you guys couldn’t make the time to invite Splinter?"
"Guys, knock it off... Splinter can’t be dead yet—we still have time." Leo glared at Raphael. "Don’t screw this up now, Raph!"
"Look, guys..." Raph gave a derisive growl, doing a surprisingly good job of holding his rising anger at bay. "Enough talk already... let’s take this sick son of a bitch, all right?"
Giving the Shogun on last glance, Renet turned back to the four. This was not a good time to be having differences. "Ah, I’m really sorry, guys... but please, you must take my word. I know he hasn’t destroyed your dimension—your reality—yet!"
"So quick to anger are they..." The Shogun shook his head, but was very much pleased with himself. That distraction was just long enough to allow him to finish the ritual to eradicate Dimension A. And as that world fell in upon itself, so would they.
But she was quicker to respond, her intuition alerting her of his deceitful intentions. Venus stepped aside from the others to snap one of her kai mi into the Shogun’s swirl of sorcery. Her energy exploded only to became part of his wispy aurora. He immediately released a glowing ball back at her. Its force nearly knocked Venus from the rocky cliff to the depths below.
"Venus...!" Mike hurried over to help.
"Be not so bold!" the dark figure spat at her. "You... you should have never existed! An abomination... wench, there is no place for you in my utopia!"
Disregarding Mike’s help, Venus pulled herself back up to level ground. She held her voice low and emotionless, her heavy Asian accent still evident. "There is nothing worse than wasted potential, Shogun. You gain nothing from wanton destruction... from giving up on what already exists!"
"Words spoken in the utmost vain—in ignorance... and I can assure you, ignorance is not bliss. Time and all of Creation are my playthings... how can you possibly hope to stand against me?" The Shogun was beginning to raise his ornate Spear of Destiny from under his veils to strike when a peculiar familiarity seemed to pass between the minds of this Chinese Turtle shinobi and his own. Renet felt this, too, as fleeting and strange as it was.
"N-no... you will never understand my... th-these wrongs," he sputtered in contempt, correcting himself in mid-sentence. "Perhaps you would have, one day... but I cannot allow that future to unfold. Not again, never again! Not if I can stop it; not if I can make everything right again!" And the Shogun, in a swirl of glowing sparkles, sent enough energies through the remnants of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius to summon up again its devastating lava and steam. The crater’s edge began to crumble in the increasing quakes of the volcano.
Renet quietly chanted to herself as a cold mist enveloped the Shogun. She hoped to freeze his actions of destruction, to slow down the dimensional devastation. It pained her all the more that she could not simply trap him to another time era, as she did to the authentic Savanti. The Shogun took most of her Timestress powers when he destroyed the Council in the 79TH. He did have a tendency to repel whatever magic they put on him. This in mind, it presented another option she should try. To turn the dimension-eating Entropy on himself.
On cue, Leo and Venus braved the rocking terrain to make their attack on the tyrant. Clutching the rock with all fours, Slash crept after as well. His only intent was vengeance against the havoc The Shogun cast on his people.
The edge of the crater the other Turtles trod suddenly collapsed, taking Mike and Raph. The rock slide splashed into lava that had begun to gurgle up below. Fortunately, Don’s speedy cybernetic reflexes and bionic agility allowed him to send down a metal hooked rope from his hand to catch Mike. He couldn’t get Raph, unfortunately. Raph managed to dig his sai into the crater’s wall, many meters down and unbearably close to the rising lava. Don fretted if his small helicopter feature was powerful enough to lift Raph back up. He glanced once at the battle raged on the Shogun... time was running out.
The Shogun burst out in flames to free himself from Renet’s icy hold before Leo could attack him with the swords. The mystic fire flowed from the old wizard and wrapped around the Turtle like a slippery, hungry snake. Leo immediately dropped his searing hot sword and sought a way to put out the fire consuming his bandanna and flesh. He fell to his knees from a sudden tremor rocking through the volcano.
"Leonardo..." Venus tried to stand up again, spent from the fierce kick the Shogun delivered a minute earlier. She watched his misery end and magically heal in a blue glow from Renet’s chronal magic.
Astonished, Leo gingerly touched his healed face and arms.
"Thank you," he offered. He turned around to locate his katana to advance upon the Shogun again, but paused. The dark Shogun and Renet hovered above the crater’s edge, grabbling at each other with sparks of magic. She attempted to wrest the Spear from him, while he tried to deflect her with what he could. But Renet had locked her energy field into his, so he couldn’t knock her away. Then Leo’s eye dimly caught sight of Slash, hidden amongst the quaking shadows of rock, watching the two. The gnarled Turtle held his sai balanced in his hand, poised, just waiting for that perfect moment to strike like an assassin in hiding.
Darkened clouds of steam and soot made the stormy sky grown dark. Those effects from The Shogun’s power seemed to have confused the muddled clouds into various swirling vortices. Off to the west horizon sat an invisible sun while the full moon rising in the east turned an unnatural blood red. A strong gale wind suddenly blasted into the crater. Leo grabbed at the slopping incline of rock next to him before slipping. Faint yells came through the din... Don and Mike clung to the crater side, feverishly pulling up Raph.
A sudden light blinded all of them, accompanied with one lone deathly scream. The very air now felt charged with an ethereal kind of energy.
"... do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of..." a faint voice resonated from all around, "... woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because the trumpet blasts are about to be sounded by the other three... "
The Apocalypse...? No, my lord, shant it be time yet! Renet thoughts screamed in her last desperate attempt to stop the onslaught.
A hush fell over the ancient volcano.
As their sights returned, the ground now stood quiet. Swirls of steam wafted up from the seething crater into the clearing skies above. The only sound was that of Raph finally scrabbling to the top of what was left of the cliff. But all eyes went to Renet, bearing her recovered Sceptre of the Sands of Time in her hands. The Shogun laid as a drained figure on the ground near her.
She sighed heavily, woefully. "Sorry... you never had the right be like a god either."
Leonardo quickly glanced around for a headcount. Only Slash came up missing. But his thoughts drifted elsewhere, as he found he was suddenly feeling strangely dizzy and weak. He sat down to put a hand to his pounding head, wondering if the fire had something to do with it.
"Wha—"
"Time to pay, Shogun!"
Slash’s voice. Above.
As Slash rushed out from his place of concealment, the two engaged in a vicious mêlée, Slash immediately carrying the element of surprise with a flying kick to the back of the Shogun’s head. The two opponents’ movements became nearly a blur, the sounds of their blocking and parrying each other’s blows and grunting the only way for the other Turtles and Renet to make sense of the battle.
"You bleed!" Slash seethed in his bass-laden deep voice, doubling back from an assault and showing his spiked teeth. Traces of crimson could be seen gleaming on the Turtle’s twisted version of a sai.
"And so do you."
Slash felt a slight tingling sensation he couldn’t quite describe. His facial features began to ease as his gaze deliberately slowly traveled down to the source—the Shogun’s handheld tanto dagger, jutting out of his frontal plastron and gut. "You...." Slash seethed, the anger broiling back into his expression. He spit his own blood in his enemy’s masked face. "I’ll see you in hell, Shogun!"
"You may, at that." With that, the Shogun reared back, sheathed his tanto, and drove the Spear of Destiny he bore in his other hand into Slash’s midsection. The death blow. The holy artifact pierced Slash’s shell and flesh like a hot knife through butter.
The burly Turtle fell. Bracing a booted foot against Slash’s chest, with a look of repugnance that could be detected even with his noh mask on, the Shogun withdrew his Spear and stood away from the still body of his slain adversary.
"Slash!"
Into position now, cautiously, Renet knelt not far behind the Shogun. The sai Slash had speared him with, the pain of which momentarily diverting the Shogun’s attention from his spellcasting, helped her cast a spell that did the same thing he had done before the six Turtles had arrived minutes ago—reaching beyond the frozen nexus that was The End of Time for all of existence, she drew upon the limitless anti-matter energies of Entropy. She used it not to utterly erase alternate dimensions from existence or birth new ones, as he had. Not quite.
"Whuh-what is this... no... nooo!"
No, Renet simply turned it against he who wielded it; she turned it back on The Shogun. It took every ounce of her power, utilized everything she had ever been taught, and every bit of her concentration... but she was pleased to see her efforts appeared to have been successful.
"You... how could you?" the old Shogun wheezed his words to Renet.
Renet sensed how the Entropy slowly ate away at the Shogun’s immortality then like a fast, malignant cancer. Visually, its effects were almost instantaneous. The Shogun crumpled to his knees, the component atoms and molecules in his body themselves already beginning to waver.
"No," The Shogun interrupted her attempt to reply. There was a solemn tone to his voice then, while formerly so coolly modulated. "No, no... don’t answer that... I’ll tell you." He slowly reached up to pull his Japanese noh mask down.
Renet recoiled with shock, stepping away. She’d had a feeling... but this... this was extreme. A hush fell over the observing Turtles as they watched in mutual disbelief.
The unmasked Shogun looked very much just like one of the Turtles—at a ripe elderly age—but with the addition of a cloak, Savanti’s horned helm, and vaguely samurai-esque armor that complemented the other miscellaneous regalia he was clad in. A closer look revealed, even with the wrinkles, that it could be none other.
The Shogun was Leonardo.
"I am Leonardo," the unmasked Shogun confirmed her suspicions, "One and the same as you knew... over there." He exhaled sharply as he nodded to the other, a slight wheeze to his breath.
"Damn you..." The younger Leonardo, apparently himself also wrought with pain perhaps from the scuffle, cringed at the weakened Shogun with clenched fists. "You’re not me... you can’t be! Lies!"
"I am you," the Shogun spoke, his voice leaving no question. "Older... wiser, I had thought."
"How.. did you come to this?" Renet knelt back down.
He coughed, trying to regain his composure. "There was a time, beyond this... beyond this, but closer than you think. We had lain our Master Splinter to rest... little by little, we drifted apart... perhaps it was inevitable..." His painful gaze slowly shifted to the ground, the memories becoming more than he could bear in his present condition. "But after that, we... I couldn’t help you, my brothers, through the pain of his loss. I was never a good enough leader... never as good as Splinter wanted me to be, damn him; never as good as you all needed me to be..." he solemnly went on. "Raphael was the first to leave; Donatello not long afterward. And then Michaelangelo went to another place in hopes that would help... but I heard his depression got the better of him."
Renet held her tongue, only looking away with some disapproval. She began to realize, with the Shogun’s death, would also mean the death of the 19 year-old Leonardo. They were the same being from the same dimension—reality—only from different points in its twists within the timestream.
"But I tried... God, I tried. I tried to pull them back together for a reunion. Had to be strong... had to be the leader..." His gaze grew distant. "They still found something to add to the void we created, instead of closing it."
"That wasn’t your fault," Michaelangelo spoke to the Shogun, "but what you’ve done to all the people you’ve just killed... that’s all you, man. That’s all you."
The Shogun nodded bitterly, grinning weakly at the same time. A bit of their Leonardo shone through, if only just a little. "Mikey... you speak the truth, as always. I wish I had your spirit... your... humanity." He gave a sigh, then a cough. "After the reunion in New York, after we were all together... and after we all drifted apart again... I found the means to time-travel back... I stopped Splinter’s needless death. I stopped it!" The pain in the Shogun’s words almost made it unbearable for him to speak them. "I killed the DARPA agents that had killed our master in my time with my bare hands... and Splinter didn’t die this time, not from those bastards." He winced. "But th-this just postponed the inevitable... our Master Splinter still died, years later, this time of natural causes. The result was the same, we drifted apart—I had changed nothing. Nothing!" The Shogun weakly slammed his fist on the rocky ground. "How long I have lived like a failure... over 80 years I have lived, broken in both spirit and soul."
"I-I suppose..." the younger Leonardo wheezed, himself now almost in a similar state as the Shogun, "... you think we should pity you... forget you’re a murderer..."
The Shogun closed his eyes upon hearing his younger self’s words. He shut them out, going on, "A voice began speaking to me in the Astral Plane, explaining of how reality can be altered... how I could erase all this pain." He shook his head in remembrance. "It sounded all too wonderful—to bring back the love and fulfillment of a complete family in a perfect world... honor restored... redemption mine for the taking." The old Leonardo let a sorrow-filled sigh. "Did you not see, my brothers? Did you not see in the dimensions I sent you... did you not see how the four of us—or five of us, in one case—stuck together? How we persevered? My intentions... honorable, I swear it on every fiber of my being." He laid his head down and closed his pained eyes. He didn’t have long now. "Now I have lost... I have failed... again. My deliverance... my swan song... in vain."
Renet noticed the others now stood near her, watching and listening in graven silence. Don noticed the younger Leo’s serious condition, and stayed with his brother. He grew all the more concerned when finding Leo’s pulse suddenly became impossible.
The future Leonardo gazed past Renet and Venus at his three younger brothers behind sunken eyes. There was no evil to be found in them—none, only sadness, loneliness, and failure. "Don’t forget your brotherhood..." His voice growing rougher, the Shogun strained to make his final words known to everyone, "Please... then, if anything... please remember the true forces that bind you. Without love, the mind... nothing. The heart... a gaping hole—so much more painful than the Entropy that eats away the very matter of my existence this moment—and hope... lost forever. Remember... or my life’s work will be... for naught... sorry... so sorry..." He ended. A hollow sound surrounded him and his body vanished.
There, at the End of Time, the menace of The Shogun was finally at an end.
"Leo...! What...?" they heard Don shout from behind. Renet turned to meet his shock. "Leo... our Leo, he’s... he disappeared, too!"
"No..." Raph breathed through gritted teeth, his face twitching with a rage of emotion boiling underneath.
Venus looked to Renet after a long, uneasy silence. "Can you not bring back the dimensions that were destroyed? There must be a way, there must!"
"No," the young Mistress of Time replied grimly. "It would be one thing if the Shogun had merely closed the doors to the dimensions he opened... but he wiped them out altogether, total erasure. And Leo..." She gave a helpless sigh, her slender shoulders sagging. "I just don’t know."
The others stood, looking at Renet and each other in dismay. But before another word was said, everything flashed coma white. Their next sight was of the walls in Mike’s apartment—actually, April and Casey’s—back in their own New York City, and no more than a few hours from the time they left by the time on the clock atop the TV (unless a day or two had passed). But, like waking up from a bad dream, they hoped to see Leonardo—their Leonardo—with them again. They didn’t.
He was gone. Truly gone.
"My sons... how I have missed you all. And... a fifth among you...?"
Splinter stood before them in the living room minus Renet, knowing, caring, understanding what had happened. He whispered to them then, beckoning to his surrogate sons and new daughter with his arms and embracing his remaining sons in a huddle for reassurance. Showing how great the unabated power of love can be, when exercised; how devastating anger could become, if left unchecked.
The Turtles were home. And not alone.
The Shogun’s grim lesson would not be a lesson soon forgotten.