Author's Note: In case it isn't obvious by now, I'm really struggling with chapter titles. I thought putting a colour in all of them was a neat idea at the start, and it probably would work for a print book, but everyone's advice seems to be that shorter chapters are better on Wattpad, so I ran out pretty quick. Any better title suggestions would be appreciated :)
"So how do we fight him?" Amber asked, "I don't want to run again."
"We have to run," said Mel. "I hate that as much as you do, but we have to run. No human can fight the Enemy, we know that much from previous rounds. And we can't fight him either, we just don't have enough power. If all of us were gathered together, all with the wisdom of the centuries, our full powers unlocked, and bodies at the peak of physical fitness, we could hold the line. That's what it would take to survive an attack from the Enemy, even to slow it down. But only the Princess can actually defeat it, and that's a terror in its own right."
"Because if the Enemy can kill the Princess–" Jack cut in.
"I know," Amber answered, "If the Princess dies, the world ends. Right? It's all or nothing. So where's the Princess? Do we know if she's been born? Can you find her like you did me?"
"Not really," Violet shook her head. "The Princess is alive right now, we're sure about that. But she doesn't die and come back like us. She hasn't got the same kind of destiny. The Princess... we're not so sure. She's still alive, I think. She can't die, or not like everybody else. Maybe she hibernates like a hedgehog in winter. Watching the world, getting wiser, learning from everything people do, and then hiding away until next time. Or maybe she doesn't need to hibernate, and she's just always there, always young."
"So will she have felt the monster too? Is she coming to fight it?"
"We don't know," they all opened their mouths to speak, but it was Jack who got to bring out the bad news first. "She can't fight the Enemy on her own, we know that much. Her powers are locked away somehow, so she can't use them. All she can do on her own is survive. To grant the Princess her true powers, we need to meet her and give her the strength she needs. That's our destiny. Maybe she's in human form somehow, and she needs us to remind her who she is. Or she might be hibernating, like Violet said, and she needs us to awaken her. But that's our duty, to let the Princess know we need her. And for that, from all the stories we've been reminded of, it needs all of us."
"So we just keep running?" Amber couldn't believe it, "We let all those people get hurt, and we can't even save them? We're not much good as superheroes then! Heroes, and all we can do is try to stay alive until the rest of us are born?"
"Worse than that," Jack growled, slamming his fist down on the obsidian surface of the table, "Because it's going to be nearly ninety years before Violet is born again. And there's no way Mel can live that long. All these attempts, and we've lost. Just like that, all we've been doing is nothing."
"I don't believe you," Amber answered, just as strongly. The same determination that had filled her in the coffee shop came rushing back, and she found that she was so angry with this old man who thought he knew everything. "You said there's so many things we can't remember, right? So maybe there's some way we can still beat this enemy, or hold it off until we can all get together. Maybe there's some emergency plan we've forgotten in case this happens, a way to wake the Princess with only some of us. Does it have to be all of us, or just all the ones who are alive? Whoever wrote down these rules in the first place, the first Rainbow Knights however many thousand years ago, from what you've told me they were always born at the same time. So that means they never thought about not all being alive. Maybe waking the Princess only needs the ones who are alive? Or maybe we can pull her into a dream to wake her up. Or maybe there's something we never even thought of?"
"She's right," Violet said, a little tremor of hope just starting to show through the fear in her voice. "We all know that no weapon forged can harm the Enemy. No tool of mortal man is strong enough to defeat him, that's one of the big things we've passed down without ever forgetting."
"And that's why it's all down to the Princess. If all the weapons humanity's created can't scratch him, then our individual powers won't either." Alex spoke decisively, and it was obvious in every gesture that she'd been a teacher at some point. A teacher who was trying to hide her anger at students who just didn't understand.
"Passed down for twenty thousand years," Violet repeated, "Think about that, not just repeating it. What kind of weapons did humanity have so long ago? That's twice as old as the first pyramid in ancient Egypt. Older than the oldest building people have ever found. Older than anything we know, somewhere between cavemen and tribes with tents. Yeah, nothing those people made could ever hope to hurt the Enemy. But they couldn't hurt most soldiers these days, either. Can you imagine a caveman trying to open a tank with his club? Or hoping a shield made out of some animal skin will keep him safe from a laser-guided missile that can blow open a bunker from three miles away, or whatever they're using these days?"
"They're right," Mel interrupted before Jack could say anything, "It's against everything we've learned, but they're right. Everything we know about the Enemy's power is based on stories from thousands of years ago. Modern technology would seem like magic to the people who wrote those stories, the world could have passed the Enemy since then, and we never noticed. Think about it, think about the pyramid of powers. At the bottom there's ordinary people, right? And then the wise and the crafty, shamans and alchemists. Then at the top of humanity is us, the aspects of the rainbow. And above us, the Princess, and right at the top the Enemy, who the Princess can only beat with our power to assist her."
"Whom," Alex's lips shaped a correction, but it was a whisper and Amber would have been surprised if anyone else noticed.
"We've been imagining the world like that ever since we learned about it," Mel carried on regardless, "But there's no shamans any more. Maybe they've been replaced by scientists. But in that pyramid, the normal humans and the scientists have kept on rising. In the Old Kingdom, some of the stories imply that we were like lords. Ruling a whole county, and using our powers like a badge of authority. Think about it seriously, how do you think it would go down if you walked up to your local mayor last time you were alive and said 'bow down before me, look at what I can do'. How many people would follow you on the basis of our powers?"
"Some," Alex nodded, "But not enough. You're right, the normal people have overtaken us, because we stayed reliant on what we've always had, while they kept growing. There's a chance that now they can do what we couldn't."
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✅ End of the Rainbow
FantasySometimes love lasts forever. If people are determined enough, and have one hand on the pulse of destiny that permeates the universe, it might be possible to guarantee that some day you will meet again. It doesn't matter how many centuries pass, if...