“It’s fading,” Tygra said quietly. He didn’t need to specify what. The sword’s sight had shrunk to a hundred yards. Their mutant tracking crystals were inert. Panthro’s prized Thundertank sat outside in pieces, stripped for wiring to power a single flickering lamp.
In the tenth year of the Plundered Sun, when the sky over Third Earth bled a perpetual copper twilight, the ThunderCats huddled in a cave that smelled of rust and failure. Not the proud den beneath the Cat’s Ledge—that was a glass-and-iron tomb now, crushed by Mumm-Ra’s tower-ships. Lion-O stood at the cave mouth, the Sword of Omens balanced across his knees. The Eye of Thundera glowed weakly, a dying coal in a burnt-out hearth. thundercats
And the Sword of Omens, resting across his knees, pulsed once—warm, alive, and utterly content. “It’s fading,” Tygra said quietly
“Right?” Mumm-Ra laughed. “I am older than right. I was old when the first god learned to lie.” Their mutant tracking crystals were inert
Lion-O looked up at the sky. Somewhere up there, beyond the light of Third Earth’s healed sun, was the ghost of a planet called Thundera. Not his home anymore. But that was all right. Home was the person leaning against his shoulder, the engineer trying to fix a broken lamp, the blind seer humming an old song, and the two kits arguing over who got the last piece of dried meat.
“You stabbed yourself,” she said finally.