Mumm-Ra tilted his head, genuinely curious. “The engineer speaks wisdom. Unusual for a species that builds bombs before houses.” He turned back to Lion-O. “Here is my offer. Give me the Sword of Omens—the physical blade, not its dead heart. I will return your cheetah. I will let you leave. You can live out your days in whatever cave remains. You can even keep the sword’s hilt. A souvenir.”
“You said you convinced the sun to hate us,” Lion-O said quietly. “That means the sun can be unconvinced.”
“No,” Lion-O agreed. “But it has a heart. And I have a sword that’s been inside that heart before. Every ThunderCat who ever lived put a piece of themselves into the Eye of Thundera. Not power. Not energy. Memory . The taste of rain on the homeworld. The sound of a mother’s voice. The weight of a sleeping kit in your arms.” thundercats
“Cheetara!” Lion-O lunged, but Panthro grabbed his arm.
Then he looked at the Plundered Sun. And he understood something Mumm-Ra had forgotten. Mumm-Ra tilted his head, genuinely curious
“Then we move tonight,” Lion-O replied. His voice was not the boastful cry of the lord who’d once challenged the Ancient Spirits of Evil. It was the rasp of a leader who’d watched his family starve.
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. “Here is my offer
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.
“Just a little.”