Cheetara’s eyes widened. “The Spirit Passage. Lion-O, that’s not a tunnel. It’s a dimension slip. One wrong step and you’re scattered across five realities.”

“You are alone,” Lion-O said, and pulled the sword from his chest.

“It was a very shallow stab.”

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.

He gestured, and the Sword’s Eye flickered—and went black. Dead. Lion-O stared at the empty crystal, and for the first time in his life, he felt truly naked.

He raised the sword—the dead sword, the empty hilt—and drove it into his own chest.

“You stabbed yourself,” she said finally.

“Don’t look at the walls,” Cheetara hissed. “Look only at my feet.”

“Don’t. He wants you angry. Anger is easy to bend.”

And the Sword of Omens, resting across his knees, pulsed once—warm, alive, and utterly content.

“And fifty mutants guarding it,” Panthro grunted from where he was trying to weld a cracked gauntlet with a melted spoon. “We tried that two moons ago. Remember? When Lynx-O lost his other eye?”

They walked for hours, days—time lost meaning. Snarf fell twice, and each time Tygra caught him with a whip of his bolo, the last of his power. Bengali’s fur turned gray at the temples. When they finally emerged, it was not into the spire’s base but into its heart: a circular chamber the size of a cathedral, filled with floating screens showing every corner of Third Earth. At the center, suspended in a column of black light, was the Plundered Sun—a star the size of a fist, weeping energy into Mumm-Ra’s machines.

“Just a little.”

“There’s a Munitions caravan leaving the Dog City tomorrow,” Bengali said for the third time. “Plastoid shells. Power cells. Maybe even a working cloaking emitter.”

For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Panthro set down his useless welding tool and laughed—a dry, broken sound. “Finally. A plan stupid enough to work.” They left at false dawn, when the copper sky turned the color of old blood. Cheetara led them through a fissure behind a dead waterfall, into a labyrinth of hexagonal passages that hummed with a frequency that made Lion-O’s teeth ache. The Spirit Passage was not a place. It was a memory of a place, flickering between geometries. At one point, WilyKit screamed—she’d seen herself as an old woman, standing at the far end of a corridor that hadn’t been there a second ago.