Chapter Text
In the heart of the perpetual night of the Dark Hemisphere, Skeletor, the Skull-Faced Lord of Destruction and Supreme Leader of the Legion of Evil Warriors on Eternia, was stuck in the petrified bowels of Snake Mountain staring deeply into a bone-encrusted scrying portal.
It was late. He had two tabs open: one was Prince Adam’s Eternagram, and the other was supposed to be work.
Skeletor was sworn to defeat He-Man, the Most Powerful Man in the Universe, and retake Castle Grayskull to gain Ultimate Power, and thus conquer the Light Hemisphere of Eternia.
A simple three-step plan, and it all started with Prince Adam.
Skeletor knew He-Man was Prince Adam’s secret identity from the get-go.
I mean, look at them. They were identical. He-Man was just a little more tan, his hair was styled a little different and he runs around mostly naked.
Skeletor saw a reel of Adam at his dad’s place (the Palace Eternos).
Adam was doing downward dog. Head down, ass up. Stretching his hamstrings and back and Achilles tendons on a yoga mat.
Cringer the “fearless” giant magical talking green tiger casually walked through the frame.
A Burberry flat cap hung on a hook. A shiny new panther tattoo was briefly visible as Adam’s sleeve rode up. A battered Jeanette Winterson paperback with a vintage photo of a kid holding a beachball on the cover peeked out of Adam’s canvas tote bag.
The tote bag was silk-screened with a picture of a dive bar urinal, covered in graffiti and uncleaned since the 1986 visit of the Cosmic Comet.
Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Skeletor knew that album art.
Skeletor ransacked his brain for obscure East Coast downtempo hip-hop knowledge: The urinal, it’s— it’s— It’s— the cover art from, uh, from Blockhead’s 2025 EP It's Only a Midlife Crisis If Your Life Is Mid!
Skeletor loved that shit! It’s got like 25 likes on YouTube. Well worth a listen.
Skeletor’s eye sockets went soft for just a moment. “Curse you, Zagraz, and curse your stupid power-of-friendship comet, too,” he muttered.
Beast Man, Skeletor’s brutal and very orange second-in-command, said "we should attack. Give me fifty Shadow Beasts from Bravo, just one reinforced platoon. One platoon from Delta company for indirect fire. Give me four Griffins: Two configured for local air superiority and two for close air support. There’s a lot of luxury condos in Evergreen Forest, so I need the Focused Lethality Munition glide bombs with the post-launch adjustment capability to minimize collateral. And I want Man-E-Faces, Kobra Kahn and Two Bad in QRF. Evil-Lyn’s team can run magical/cyber support from Snake Mountain Command.”
Skeletor stared at the portal, lost in thought.
“Lord Skeletor,” said Beast Man, “we will not get a better opportunity to infiltrate the Evergreen Forest and raid the Fertile Plain. Just a three month guerrilla campaign to interdict a substantial portion of Eternos’ food supply right before the peak of the harvest. It will be as devastating as when you dammed the River of Rain in Operation Golden Book. The press still calls that one ‘The River of Ruin.’ This is why you sent me to Maneuver Captain’s Career Course in the Fright Zone on Etheria. We wargamed this EXACT scenario to death at Horde Training Hall. It was my Battle Forge final assessment: Operation Mad King George. We—”
“No,” said Skeletor. "Not today." He didn’t explain.
Because Skeletor wasn't always Skeletor. He had been Keldor. The half-Gar from the island of Anwat Gar. Crown Prince of Eternia.
Keldor the Good. The People’s Prince. Charity work removing landmines from farmer’s fields and founding the National Technological Virus Trust.
Keldor, the beloved son of Old King Miro the Wise and Queen Saryn the Fair, before that whole scandal about Queen Saryn being a secret Ha’Vokian came out.
Like Keldor, Queen Saryn was a light-skinned enough Gar to be passing, just a little Blue tinge. The marriage was supposed to be a political alliance between Miro’s Light Hemisphere and the Saryn’s Dark Hemisphere Kingdoms. A part of the terms of the Armistice that ended the Great Wars.
Unite the whole planet. An end to conflict.
Peace and Love. Justice and Truth. Maybe a little Flower Power.
But it was not to be: Some of Randor’s backers at Court had realized that global hegemony would be an end to their social advancement. Without conflict, they could not climb.
And therefore Saryn had to go.
Rampart Murderdock’s yellow press had a field day. And it turns out the pen can swing many swords.
After the Saryn Scandal, the people of The Light Hemisphere of Eternia were not dismayed: King Miro had many wives so the “Eternians” hung their hopes on King Miro and Queen Amelia’s son: Randor the Spare Prince. As if the Light Hemisphere could speak for the whole planet Eternia.
To be fair the Lightsiders did have a higher population, it was really hard to grow crops on the perpetual dark side of a tidally locked planet, but I digress.
Randor was “Eternian” on both sides of the family. White as paste with flowing brown hair. Or as Randor put it "a fullblooded human,” as if the “inferior” Gar were subhuman. The bitter Succession Wars that followed are now the topic of at least one triumphalist blockbuster film every couple of years.
Adam’s grandparents on Randor’s side, Amelia and Miro, have no Gar blood. Randor married Marlena, so Adam was half-alien from planet Earth but that doesn’t show up on Adam’s face.
Keldor had a face, once. He had hair. He had a whole thing going and then he didn't. And somewhere in there he made choices, and then the acid and the thing with Hordak’s evil magic and the skull and the hood and the evil lair…. all of that was just what came out the other side.
Snake Mountain is what you get when you don't deal with it: the constant self-sabotage of the conquest of Castle Grayskull.
You get to be a guy with a skull for a head who will never live out his dreams of finally owning a skull-themed castle.
It was ridiculous. Skeletor even had the key: The Sword of Ancient Darkness, his half of the Primordial Sword of Creation. Skeletor had bought the Sword of Ancient Darkness at a garage sale and it was still sitting in its decorative block of pure quartz somewhere in a maze of cardboard boxes in Skeletor’s basement, probably buried under Evil-Lyn’s broken Cuisinart DLC-7 Food Processor, his beloved avocado-green fondue pot, the original VHS The Conni Gordon Art Course and a partially complete set of “Awaken the Giant Within” audio cassettes by Tony Robbins.
(The stupid tapes didn't actually Awaken any Giants. Total rip-off.)
Skeletor didn’t have much use for a sword, his personal weapon was a Ha’Vok staff that could drop a man dead at four hundred meters.
But thanks to that stupid portal to Earth, technology had moved on: If only Skeletor could just set foot on the Light Hemisphere without immediately getting a drone strike to the dome then he could open up all of Grayskull’s secrets.
No. Instead he ended up living inside the fossilized colon of Ka, the Dead God of the Snake Men. Myah!
Beast Man excused himself a while ago, Skeletor didn’t notice. It was a sophomoric plan anyway and Skeletor had other things on his mind.
Besides, if he destroys his young nephew now there won't be anyone else left who likes Blockhead.
Evil-Lyn walked in. She wore comfy satin pyjamas in silver with blue piping. No makeup. She massaged leave-in conditioner into her damp, close-cropped platinum hair.
She glanced over and caught Skeletor doomscrolling. "Well look at you, hidden away like a stolen treat. What's on your mind, darlin'?"
"Nothing, honey. I was just—nothing."
Skeletor alt-tabbed the scrying portal away from Adam’s Eternagram and pulled up a spreadsheet.
Beast Man was Red on JTAC currency. Beast Man was not legally allowed to call in air strikes in combat without a full retraining cycle. Without air support OPERATION MAD KING GEORGE was dead on arrival.
Mad King George. Great plan. Where are the beans, bullets and bandages, Beast Man?
Send a Beast Man to Professional Military Education for one course and he comes back thinking he’s Sun Tzu.
Skeletor narrowed his eye sockets. Then it clicked. Skeletor didn't need a JTAC to hold a pilot's hand. He just needed to shift the liability.
This might not yet be beyond saving, thought Skeletor: Without qualified JTACs, Beast Man could just swap out the fast mover CAS for Rotons. Put a hard deck under the Air Superiority patrol to deconflict.
With Rotons, you can do a 5-line rotary wing attack brief. Anyone can do it.
The Roton was capable of VTOL. The Roton could come in low and slow and then pop-up to strike using hovering fire from a masked position, or diving fire from the overhead.
Technically, the 5-line was a request for fire, not an order. The Roton pilot, then, was solely responsible for target identification and clearing themselves to engage. If they accidentally punched a hole through a luxury condo and triggered a CivCas Assessment, then Hordak’s JAGMAN investigation would crucify the pilot—leaving Snake Mountain's command structure legally pristine. Boom.
A plan not without risk: The dual laser guns on the Roton were theoretically capable of about a two-mil dispersion at the typical 1.5 klick engagement range, but Roton pilots were notorious for never zeroing their helmet cueing systems. When commanding Rotons in combat, Skeletor had always pushed the Roton’s Battle Positions ahead of him to within 100m of the target, then backed them off to safer distances when he could trust his own air support to not shoot him in the back.
“Good shootin’ Ditz! Yehaa!” Skeletor heard his own voice in his head and it startled him a little.
Except there were no more Roton pilots on Eternia.
They had all died along with their Instructors. They had died with Ditz, their IP/EP. Skeletor couldn’t even make any new Instructors without Ditz.
That traditional Gar wedding thing was a real disaster. Skeletor put it out of his mind.
But—critique without solutions is just complaints. Skeletor was back to square one: he needed a JTAC and there were none on planet Eternia. Not even the massively overweight JTAC Instructor Skeletor used to have. That guy had spent Skeletor’s entire training budget on booze and then sauntered through the portal to become a private contractor on Earth.
Skeletor couldn’t really criticize Beast Man. Skeletor’s own JTAC currency had been expired for years. There was always so much to do around Snake Mountain that Skeletor just let it lapse.
Back when he was a young Prince of Eternia, back when he still had a face, Skeletor had held the watch as Siddim Six Actual on more than one occasion. Not just a qualified JTAC but an overall Ground Force Commander.
He had run the drill a million times on exercise, pacing around the Commander’s Pit in the Combat Operations Center at what was then the Blackwater Lodge Perpetua Plains Proving Grounds (now a Constellis Holdings facility).
His CDR laminated placard swinging on a breakaway lanyard around his neck, Battle Binder in hand and a map case covered in smudgy permanent marker. Cupping a Davies Single-Ear to his head with his other hand because the head harness was always too uncomfortable, he whipped around each station doing final checks.
“Intel, Target?”
“Green. Grid verified. Target validated, Prince Keldor”
“JAG, ROE? Collateral?”
“Green.”
“Fires, Coordination?”
“Ground is Green, sir.”
“JTAC?”
“Airspace Green. Range is clear.”
With a savage grin, he snapped, “Weapons?”
“Green,” said the civilian contractor from St Louis. “Spun up and tracking.”
Then Skeletor waved away the JTAC and got on the horn himself: “Pepperbox One-Eight, this is Siddim Six Actual. 9-line to follow. Type 3. Bomb on Coordinate. Lines 1 through 3 not applicable. 2014 feet. Target is one-times Land Shark, immobile. Victor Alpha 385 211. Marked with Beacon. Friendlies West, two thousand. Line 9, surprise me.”
“Siddim Six, Pepperbox One-Eight. 2014 feet, Victor Alpha 385 211. Uh, copy good surprises.”
“Correct.”
“Siddim Six, Pepperbox One-Eight. In heading one-eight-zero.”
“This is Six Actual. You are Cleared to Engage.”
“Siddim Six, six-zero!”
“Clock is running!” said Skeletor’s OpsO.
The pod view on the main monitor shuddered as the newly adopted JDAM separated from the rack and listened to the brand new constellation of GPS satellites that Boeing had wrapped around Eternia.
Silence hung in the COC for exactly sixty seconds.
Then the cheering started. He’d cheered. They all cheered because a scrapped, captured Horde Land Shark on the Proving Grounds erupted into a shower of white-hot, molten metal, validating the Blaster Hawk’s new weapons carriage envelope.
Cheering. It was only an exercise, and everyone was cheering. We handed out cigars in violation of the new company Tobacco, Gifts and Emoluments policy and made bomb noises with our mouths like kids playing on the carpet. We thought it was so fucking cool.
So many exercises and weapons tests in Skeletor’s tender formative years, during the Long Peace of Miro that ended the Great Wars. The same weapons that the Crown would use on him.
It just hits different, thought Skeletor, in your summative years.
That was before the Succession Wars.
If Skeletor still had eyelids he would have rubbed them. Blue light from the Excel spreadsheet reflected off the smooth yellowed bone of his orbital sockets as the numbers that represented his dwindling forces swam in front of him.
There had been cheering on both sides during the Succession Wars, too. Relentless, unending. So much cheering. Loud like a manticore’s roar, like the crowds at a Royal Eternian Guard/Navy game.
“Good hits. Good hits.”
Skeletor needed air power.
“Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air,” said Skeletor to himself, “fights like a savage against modern Eternian troops.”
So: What would it actually take?
Skeletor pinched the bridge of where his nose used to be. He shuffled through the brochures that the booth babes from the various training schoolhouses had thrust into his hands.
Most of the price lists were stale so he threw out everything except the leaflets from the most recent DARKHEMEX defense trade show.
Ouch.
That right there was a two million Eternian gold crown course to recertify Beast Man’s JTAC quals, lowest bidder.
What was that? Like, um, fifteen million Hordebux?
That meant range hire at the new Constellis (formerly Blackwater) facility on the Plains of Perpetua. It meant navigating the Defense Travel System Routing List to find the Approving Official for the Temporary Additional Duty (really got to remember to get Beast Man his Self Approving Official status).
It meant contract-Griffin riders’ flight hours. It meant contacting Hordak or even Horde Prime to send out an Instructor—because Curse You All, we sure don’t have any more of those—and it meant at least two hundred thousand gold crowns for the inert training ordnance alone.
Evil-Lyn put on a satin hair wrap and went to bed. She didn’t wait up. Evil-Lyn was not one to interrogate every little silence, and they woke up and went to sleep at different times. Especially on ops.
One day, Skeletor will die thinking he was practically married. Evil-Lyn thought of it as shift work planned around good sex.
Skeletor had never talked to Evil-Lyn about this. It’s too risky, emotionally, for Skeletor— even if he lacked the vocabulary to express it in those terms.
No, it’s far safer for Skeletor to wage a global terror campaign and conquer the planet first. Reclaim his lost birthright. Sit on Grayskull’s throne and THEN say to Evil-Lyn “I did this all for you.”
If it’s a fait accompli then there’s no way for Skeletor to lose the battle he actually cared about: If she accepts his gift of the Bright Moon and the Dark Moon on a string, then Skeletor makes Evil-Lyn his Queen.
And if she should spurn his gift, then Skeletor can act all insulted. “How dare she? After all that I have sacrificed for her! The ungrateful bitch!”
It’s less scary for Skeletor to literally fight the world than it was to have just one conversation where he couldn’t control the outcome.
The stakes were too high. Emotional avoidance at civilizational scale. He’s fighting a cosmic war just to avoid that one conversation, because he was raised to believe that deeds spoke louder than words.
It’s just less scary to be angry rather than hurt.
Dr. Evelyn Powers could see that conversation coming from a mile away. She’d spent her youth in Savannah learning how to manage narcissistic rages with sweet tea and a tongue so sharp the cuts were painless, and she had honestly run out of shits to give.
She’d been through a lot since the day Commander Marlena Glenn crashed their shuttle on Eternia and Evelyn had to become Evil-Lyn.
Living at Palace Eternos. The Succession Wars.
Dragging Keldor’s acid scarred and almost decapitated body to Hordak. Discovering under Hordak’s tutelage that she was way better at Ha’Vok magic than Zoar’s Path of Good.
Evelyn waited for ten years from the day she risked life and limb to drag Skeletor through a portal to Hordak for something, anything. Just for a sliver of recognition.
Just some indication that Skeletor understood the danger Evelyn had faced to save everything of Keldor but his face. That was a pretty big win in her books.
Where was Skeletor’s gratitude? Evelyn had never seen it. Just more “opportunities” for her to be of service—
Evil-Lyn! Use that beamer to send He-Man to another dimension where he’ll be lost forever!
Evil-Lyn! Drop what you’re doing at Cybercommand and lead fucking Hover Robots in combat even though you’re fifty-five years old and barely scored 181 on your last Snake Mountain Fitness Test!
Evil-Lyn! Use your relationship with Queen Marlena to open a covert backchannel and negotiate some rules to this madness! Something like “He-Man can wreck all the Hover Robots he wants, maybe rough up the Shadow Beasts, but he has to leave headline act names alone.” You know? Put a lid on the bloodshed.
Evelyn had negotiated the rules of engagement with Marlena directly. Evelyn dressed incognito in linen trousers, tennis shoes, no-show socks, a pastel Moncler windbreaker, a wide-brimmed straw sun hat and huge fake-Gucci shades, finished with her only presentable plain white tee.
They’d held the negotiations in a small-town noodle shop Marlena owned and they both liked.
When Evelyn had walked into the empty noodle shop the manager, a Trollian named Hong, quickly flipped the sign on the door to “CLOSED” and then exited out the back door.
Five minutes later Queen Marlena walked in dressed as a kitchen hand with two bowls of the Earth-style bone-broth tonkotsu ramen that they both longed for.
"Eat up before it gets a skin on it," the Queen said, wiping her hands on a grease-stained apron. "You look like you haven't slept since the Carter administration."
Evelyn hadn’t seen the security cordon on her way in, but she knew it was extensive. Looking out the noodle shop window to the decorative parapet of the shoe store opposite, she could see two glints of light in the perpetual Light Hemisphere golden hour: side by side, one lower than the other.
A sniper and a spotter, sitting at a cast-iron-based competition bench rest they’d somehow dragged up three flights of stairs to the hot tar-and-gravel roof. Dressed in bright green-and-gold Royal Bodyguard uniforms, they weren't even bothering to use killflash on their optics. The sniper dialled his windage turret as the “Tasty Ramen!” flag outside the shop door fluttered in the breeze.
The absolute, unvarnished contempt of it all. Evelyn gave them a sweet, slow, beauty-pageant wave. Bless their tiny little hearts.
Marlena had been too good a pilot to crash accidentally. Too good a pilot to crash anywhere other than the Palace Eternos lawns.
Both astronauts had married into royalty. Earth would have a Queen in place, no matter which way the Succession Wars were wont to go.
Thus, Earth would slowly penetrate its commerce and culture into Eternia, top to bottom, through-and-through.
Marlena and Evelyn were both Rounders—covert agents sworn to the service of the Offworld Executors Working Group of the Committee of 300. It takes planetary level administration to negotiate trade with other planets, particularly planets with bird sorceresses, interdimensional travel and a man who was practically a Weapon of Mass Destruction in a loincloth.
The Inner Cabinet of the Olympians of Earth had taken one look at the intel on Eternia and said “Righto, where is my three-ring binder labeled ‘spice trade?’”
Forty years later and these two women were responsible for all the cultural, commercial and bureaucratic imports from Earth that Eternia enjoyed. Keldor thought that Evelyn saved him because she loved him, and maybe—once upon a time—she did. But it was also true that Evelyn saved him because the three-ring binder said “Always control both sides of every armed conflict, at any cost.”
Two Earth women on opposite sides of a war that was always going to happen but neither of them started, speaking a language no one else on this planet understood: cultural attaché placement, supply chain logistics, trade dependencies, mutually assured economic destruction.
Marlena had smiled when Evelyn proposed the "headline acts stay alive" rule.
"That's very reasonable," said the Queen, in the tone of someone who'd already won. Marlena took a slow, methodical slurp of her noodles. She’d flown stealth fighters long enough to know when her prey were aware she had a lock on them, just by the way they moved.
Marlena smiled, as steady and unblinking as the aperture on an Infrared Search and Track system. "Agreed. We keep the main pieces on the board, keep interplanetary trade open, and nobody gets their wings clipped. Works for me."
Marlena smiled sweetly because she knew what nobody else on Eternia knows, what Evelyn only had a gnawing suspicion of—
That the war, all the death, the lies, every sham relationship, Eternia, the whole Universe— all of it exists for one purpose and one purpose only:
To sell action figures.
On Eternia, but more lucratively on Earth.
To middle-aged collectors who insisted on Mint on Card packaging and never took them out of the original plastic.
The Eternian 4th Psychological Operations Group was already shooting promos for the new “Cafe Adam/Adam Glenn” limited collectible: He-Man as you’ve never seen him before!
The perpetual golden hour of the Light Hemisphere always made the foreground pop as Prince Adam caught the sunlight and by the time the video was compressed and sent through the portal back to Earth everything looked flat and toon-shaded.
Fans loved it.
Evil-Lyn! How’d it go? After months of negotiation and great risk to yourself, we ONLY got the deal to cover the Dark Hemisphere? We couldn’t get planet Infinita? Well, it will HAVE TO DO!
Well of course it didn’t cover Infinita. Evelyn had been a physical scientist, but she knew enough social sciences to identify Infinita as part of what Saul Bernard Cohen called the “shatter belt.” The permanent away game where these exhausting fights between sandbox bullies played out with proxies and brinkmanship.
If you needed it to cover Infinita, you’d have to first ask for it to cover Infinita. And then Evelyn could start working up a business case.
She could have done it, passed it up the chain, got it in front of the right think-tanks. Frame it as part of a new overland interdimensional commerce route—One Belt, One Portal.
But Skeletor never asked. About anything. He always needed to be the smartest man in the room.
Couldn't the man who used to be Keldor just think to ask Evelyn what she needed?
But no. Over the years something slowly flickered, guttered and died in Dr. Evelyn Powers until eventually she expected nothing at all.
Evelyn was fifty-five years old. She hasn’t done any chemistry in a serious research capacity in over 30 years. All of her Earthbound colleagues thought she was dead. She was no longer a Lady of King Miro’s court and henceforth lived inside a dead snake.
Astronaut. Chemist. Noblewoman. Rebel. Sorcerer. Savior. Lieutenant. Diplomat. Spy. Whatever she was now.
She’s had to shed whole existences like snakeskins that got too tight.
Skeletor busted his low body-fat percentage ass to be worthy of Evil-Lyn, for losing her was his greatest fear above all. But Skeletor didn’t know that you can’t subtract from nothing in the pre-Babylonian arithmetic of their relationship.
Skeletor didn’t know that as far as Evil-Lyn was concerned, he simply had nothing to lose.
She shut the door to their bedchamber and climbed into the satin sheets that cover the California King hybrid pocket spring on a bedframe made of mammoth ivory.
Yes. One day Skeletor will die, thinking he was married. Thinking he was known and loved. Evil-Lyn will move on from this, and just call it “a thing I did for a while.” She wasn’t evil, that Evil-Lyn. She was just not that into him anymore.
Back at the spreadsheet, Skeletor saw Evil-Lyn’s magical warfare brigade was running on expired foci, duct tape and prayer.
Tri-Klops had been ordered to strip half the Hover Robots for parts to keep the other six going until the Horde Empire could funnel more money to him or cheaper substitute parts could be found.
Everything Tri-Klops needed traced back through the Eternos portal to Earth eventually.
Earth components in Horde machinery. Earth pharmaceuticals in Snake Mountain's medkits. Earth semiconductors in everything Duncan built for the Eternian Royal Guard.
Earth contractors supplying every side, renting training range facilities and technical know-how. The threat of sanctions genuinely terrified Skeletor and when Hordak came calling asking about a dismal lack of progress Skeletor was always forced to ask Evil-Lyn to talk to him and be the voice of reason.
The backwater planet that nobody respected had somehow become the only place that manufactured multi-layer ceramic capacitors to spec. Earth was the factory of the Universe. A disgusting, polluted world even by Horde Empire standards. Nobody ever went to Earth.
Skeletor stared at his spreadsheet. Six Hover Robots. A couple of platoons of Shadow Beasts.
Beast Man could barely field a company-sized element on exercise, and the flea-bitten fur brain wanted to go into action with that? Skeletor admired Beast Man’s bravery, but “Force Protection” and “Economy of Force” had become Skeletor’s critical concerns—heresies both to Ha’Vok.
Zoarian degeneracy, as his maternal uncle Dash-Shel would say.
A true Ha'Vokian would have led one glorious charge years ago. Everyone to Preternia, attended by 72 virgins. War over by lunch.
Ha’Vok was a philosophy of radical acceptance born of the predatory aerial-megafauna that dominated the ecology of the Gar homeworld, planet Infinita. The Ram didn’t just eat all the grass and butt heads; the Ram was constantly under threat of predation from the Great Birds. This faith persisted even when the Gar diaspora escaped Infinita and settled on Eternia on the island of Anwat Gar.
Rather than hide in a sheepfold, the Ram faced the Vulture’s beak and opened his heart to death. To die, authentic to yourself and unafraid, was the only way to live.
But Skeletor had been raised in Palace Eternos. He'd gone to staff college. He'd learned to see his people as resources to preserve, and he couldn't unlearn it—not even for the faith he'd chosen. He was a heretic to his own heresy, and that was the only reason why any of them were still alive.
Skeletor would have to start a brand new outreach program, maybe go back to his roots on Infinita. Build or suborn some Bone Madrasas to act as a new recruiting pipeline for prospective Skelcon Warriors to supplement the Beast Man’s dwindling Shadow Beasts. Skeletor sighed, and wondered if anyone in his organization appreciated how thin the recruiting pool for impossibly swole skeletons was.
Skeletor received an email from the cruel Prince Zegor of House Shadus.
Oh, thank the Eye of the Vulture! Skeletor had assisted Zegor—whom Skeletor had nicknamed Pig-Head—in the fight against Sun-Man, a melanin-themed hero from the planet Trefixa.
Skeletor had loaned Zegor a team of technical advisors led by Hordak’s ISR expert Mantenna for the whole Sunstone heist at the Temple of the Sun on Eternia’s Sands of Time.
The Sunstone thing turned out to be a disaster when the Palace Guard showed up out of nowhere, but Hypno—the deep-cover agent that Skeletor had placed in Sun-Man’s orbit—remained undetected and fed solid intel back to Zegor. So naturally Skeletor called it a win and reached out to call in the favor.
Could it be that Zegor would send Subtractus? No. Skeletor remembered Subtractus was definitely booked to fight Digitino— Um, Digitino was like Sun-Man’s Latino IT expert.
Yeah. Subtractus was fighting Sun-Man’s computer guy.
No, Skeletor didn’t understand it either.
Skeletor didn’t know why it’s important he’s Latino. Look, diversity and inclusion were A-Okay in Skeletor’s book.
“Representation is very important,” said Skeletor, to nobody in particular. “Always has been, still is.”
Skeletor knew all about discrimination in modern-day Eternia.
When Skeletor was three years old he made his own mother cry when he said he would never be King because none of the dolls with crowns on their heads were Blue like he was.
Why? Skeletor’s mother was Blue! Okay? In case you hadn’t noticed.
I get it. Skeletor, the ill-fated Lord of Snake Mountain, might be a little privileged for your tastes— the evil lair, the minions, the Hover Robots, perpetually on the ropes, perpetually too big to fail. But Skeletor knows the struggle.
Skeletor knew what it’s like to be denied your birthright, the birthright of dignity that belongs to all creatures living and undead.
To have it stolen from you by some Golden Übermensch wearing a furry loincloth and a gray vinyl BDSM bulldog harness decorated with a red Iron Cross.
Don’t think for a second that Skeletor had transcended being judged by the color of the skin on his face by virtue of not having any.
Oh, for Ha’Vok’s sake! Skeletor was up at zero-dark-thirty and talking to himself again.
Okay, no problemo.
Maybe Zegor might have some Shadow Banished to send, or maybe just one guy. Just one guy would be alright if it’s a headline act like Cube-Face, Chem-Brain, or even fucking Snizzler. Anything.
Skeletor exhaled a breath he didn’t know his lipless skull could hold.
Well, nothing left but to open the email and see:
“Dear Skeletor, blah blah blah Sun-Man’s magical melanin skin is too strong…
However, I am in a position to offer you four (4) Illusory Beasts….”
What? WHAT?
Intangible Illusory Beasts? Fucking decoys?
Oh! Muchos problemo. All the problemo.
Curse. You. All.
Curses!
Skeletor reviewed the latest Intelligence Summary from Mantenna’s one-man S2 shop. Force disposition check—Beast Man hadn't done one.
He-Man. Teela. Man-At-Arms. The usual suspects.
No Ram Man sightings in... Skeletor checked the date on the last confirmed report: Three months.
Skeletor didn’t know what that meant, but Skeletor didn’t like it. When a piece leaves the board voluntarily, it usually knows something.
It hadn’t been this quiet since the time about a year ago when all the Heroic Warrior headline acts had left Eternia in the hands of the Palace Guard. Three months of silence. Then suddenly all of Skeletor’s assets on Infinita had dissolved when He-Man had shown up in a Blaster Hawk. A low-cost, light-attack counter-insurgency platform (basically an oversized hawk-themed Super Tucano) and that particular Blaster Hawk didn’t even have its radar dish equipped.
Apparently Palace Eternos thought Skeletor was too low a threat to even warrant a flight of Talon Fighters.
It had been, without a doubt, the worst year of the war so far.
He-Man seemed to be everywhere, armed with every toy in the toybox. Skeletor had sent increasingly urgent SITREPs to Hordak and then to Horde Prime begging for more resources but nobody wanted to buy him a Hover Robot.
Skeletor had spent years debating theology with Ha’Vokian Imams. Buttering up and outright bribing Sheiks and Maliks from one end of the planet to another. Personally selected and trained Bone Jihad Regional Emirs—men of intellect, fervor and promise. Built training camps, placed ammo dumps. Installed generators, sanitation and CBRN-protected HVAC into hidden caves with his own two hands—
Just one dude in a government-issue faux-fur loincloth and everything Skeletor had worked for, the whole thing, was atomized in a brutal eleven-month aerial bombing campaign that incidentally claimed over forty thousand skeletal-civilian un-lives.
And then there was that thing with the Gar wedding. Skeletor warned them: He-Man had eyes in the sky, eyes on the ground, eyes in the caves, eyes in fucking outer space.
Skeletor told them He-Man could see everything and if he could see it, he could kill it—without looking too closely at it.
His uncle Dash-Shel had been planning the wedding for months.
Uncle Dash-Shel began as a mighty Dark Hemisphere warrior, along with his father the evil scientist Thom-Shel. After the Unification at the end of the Great Wars, Dash-Shel had become Old King Miro’s Defense Minister, serving at the pleasure of Queen Saryn the Fair. In that twist of fate, Dash-Shel temporarily became a Heroic Warrior.
That was before the Succession Wars and King Randor’s anti-Gar purges. Now, Dash-Shel was a prominent leader of the Legion of Evil Warriors on Infinita more commonly known by his nom de guerre: Sy-Klone bin Dy-Lex al-Anwat Gar, the Panther of Panjshir.
Dash-Shel took Skeletor aside and said: “But I called in so many favors to get the Sorceress Shokoti to officiate for Shas’ti and Ditz. And I even did the full Eternian-style catering just for you, our guest of honor.”
Skeletor offered to pay to move the whole thing, all one hundred guests, from Infinita to Snake Mountain on Eternia where at least Skeletor still had some working Spydor Air Defense vehicles on loan from Hordak. Dash-Shel didn’t have anything better than a few hand held Stinger missiles that Charlie Wilson had abandoned on the black market in 1991. Who knew if the argon in them was still fresh?
“Oh, so ‘glorious death resisting the Tyrants of Eternia is Ha’Vok’s Will,’ but now you want to hide up a dead snake’s asshole when it’s your family? Keldor, Snake Mountain is on a different planet.”
Skeletor had been adamant: “Uncle, celebratory gunfire is not a good idea.”
“I want my granddaughter—the beautiful Shas’ti—to get married properly,” said his uncle. “Unafraid. On the plains of Infinita under the vault of the heavens where the Ram and the Vulture meet. The danger is the point, Skeletor. It has always been the point, since the Days of the Patriarchs when the Great Birds ruled the air and plucked children from their mothers’ breast! If you can’t stand exposed with your toes in the soil and your heart open to the sky you have cut yourself off from the Circle of Life.”
Skeletor had felt so ashamed that if he still had he a tongue he would have lost it.
His uncle, the Panther of Panjshir, had softened and said: “If the Vulture comes and Inshallah we all become shuhada, then that is the Will of the Ram. Wasn’t that the exact point of the Khutbah you delivered last Jumu'ah?”
And Skeletor, may Ha’Vok the all-merciful forgive him, Skeletor relented and the wedding proceeded as planned.
Yep. Positively identified Gar insurgent leadership, Skelcon military-aged skeletons, even high-value Imperial Horde officers all in the shadow of one hastily constructed replica of the Tower of Ha’Vok at Dash-Shel’s not-so-hidden base.
The Eternian JAG lawyers would have twisted themselves in knots to approve the strike. Called it a “high-level terror summit with wedding cake,” complete with celebratory gunfire lighting the perpetual night. Marking the target with bright muzzle flashes.
The whole affair had been just begging to be strafed with 32mm Blaster Hawk disks.
And honestly, could Skeletor blame He-Man? If the situation were reversed—a polar-bear fur loincloth standing to the right of a shock of red hair held back by a mammoth ivory tiara—Skeletor would have taken it without hesitation.
In fact, Skeletor had tried. Teela and He-Man’s wedding: April 5th, 2016. At Palace Eternos.
Skeletor had shaved a 12-year-old Shadow Beast, strapped a suicide vest onto him and had him infiltrate holding a dead man’s switch, dressed up as a busboy.
He-Man had figured it out, punted the kid into a swimming pool. The kid had detonated harmlessly underwater and Skeletor had to run away shouting “Curse you, He-Man!”
So it didn’t go well for Skeletor, but he had tried.
Skeletor could still hear the swelling trumpets and relentless beat from the fucking He-Man Theme instrumental arrangement echo around in his skull.
The Eternian 4th Psychological Operations Group would play it over loudspeakers as a high-decibel harassment broadcast every time He-Man and his stupid loincloth were near.
The closing credits to his fucking life.
Ta-da ta Da-da! Ta da-da ta Da-da!
Ta da-da ta-Da! Ta di DA!Pa-ra ta da Da-da! Ta da-da da Da-da!
Ta da-da ta Da, La di DA!
And then the strings:
(dun-DUN dun-DUN dun-Dun)
Yaaa ta li-pa diiii DA!
Dum DAAAA! Ta La pa dii ta di da!
HE-MAN!
And then shrapnel was flying and people were dying. Almost a relief, really. The JDAMs meant the song was over. He-Man came back for a gun run pass with his Blaster Hawk disks to pick off the survivors, cutting through the glowing columns of smoke in the black sky while Ditz’s parked Roton burned on the flightline. Ditz had been caught cold on the ramp, never even got a chance to fight back.
Neeeeooowwww! Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Du!
Shas’ti had been educated—bachelor’s degree in veterinary science. She liked to crochet and made these little hats for cats on Etsy. Skeletor still had one, somewhere. Shas’ti had given the hat to him for free one Christmas but it was too small to fit Skeletor’s loyal steed Panthor the Giant Panther.
Shas’ti had been so young. Her whole life ahead of her. And her husband of one hour!
Her husband was a pilot, known by his callsign “Ditztroyer” but his real name was Kalel bin Adi. Everyone called him “Ditz”.
Ditz was in Hordak’s air force. By the time he died at his wedding, he’d spent five years flying the Roton. He had well over 1,000 rotary-wing hours on the type and attained the coveted Instructor-Evaluator certification.
As one of the rising stars in the Horde Empire’s premier ground attack squadron, Ditz had racked up a big body count over his two combat deployments to Eternia. But he never let it get to his head. Ditz was still the nicest guy.
Ditz was a man of the people: among his groomsmen were Skelcons, Gar, and even a couple of Horde Clones. He liked to go fly fishing, played the guitar well enough (although he only knew “More Than Words” by Extreme) and occasionally turned his mind to some truly incompetent home improvement projects.
Shas’ti and Ditz.
They hadn’t had any children before they got married, but they did have a cat named Kron. After the massacre, some surviving relatives took Kron into their home but the cat never understood why Shas’ti was gone and spent all its time hiding under the house.
He-Man would probably never realize it, but he’d done the Vulture's work that day. The Horaltic Wings of Transformation had come with their hardpoints gravid with steel.
And like good Ha’Vokians, Shas’ti and Ditz, uncle Dash-Shel and the whole wedding party returned to the soil as the Ram wills it.
The wedding was full of Skeletor’s and Ditz’s families and friends and since everyone was in the family business that meant that the whole wedding was full of Skeletor’s men.
Good men. Men he had known for years. Men who had served him well.
Brothers in arms and in blood.
And in guts, too, now it seems.
“Curse you, He-Man,” Skeletor said softly.
As the Sheikh of Snake Mountain under Hordak, Skeletor had—how shall we put this? Skeletor had operated under relaxed collateral damage considerations. But he knew how the Eternian Military operated: a ratio of thirty innocents to each High-Value Target was considered an acceptable margin. The wedding had been nothing but prominent fighters, insurgent leaders and their families. That was easily four-to-one. Well under the threshold.
Under Eternian Rules of Engagement that was a clean strike. It’s not that He-Man committed a war crime that particular day. It’s that He-Man didn’t, and somehow, that’s worse. Skeletor sees the strike through the enemy's eyes and confirms: they did nothing wrong.
The lawyers at the Eternian JAG hadn’t had to twist anything. Which meant they'd do it again. Which meant he couldn’t protect his people by following any rules, because the rules were designed to kill them.
Skeletor supposed that in an Eternian Combat Operations Center somewhere his old colleagues had been cheering for the obliteration of Ditz’s wedding, just like Skeletor had cheered when he was young.
At least the catering had been pretty good, what little Skeletor had tried before that furry loincloth showed up and made Skeletor lose his appetite.
That fucking loincloth! Where does He-Man put his IFAK? In his prison pocket? Maybe He-Man just never needed a first aid kit.
Or at least, Skeletor prayed to Ha’Vok that the furry thing between He-Man’s legs was a loincloth.
Skeletor was running an insurgency on a shoe string because Skeletor’s state-sponsor was Hordak’s Empire, themselves a tributary vassal state of the Great Galactic Horde. And Hordak’s Empire was having its own problems with rebellion on the planet Etheria and every day the Empire had more Eternian foreign-fighters infiltrating Etheria’s borders, which was somehow Skeletor’s fault for not stopping them at their points of origin.
Last Skeletor heard, Hordak’s counter-insurgency efforts were foundering due to the Etherian local partner forces such as Sea Hawk’s Pirates, Sweet Bee’s Bee People, the Hunga Harpies, the Magicat Awakening and the Sons of Etheria were ultimately proving, um—let’s just say they were “politically unreliable.”
Even the Salineas Sea Elves figured out how to hack their mind control chips and turned their guns on Hordak’s Training and Advisor Corps.
Skeletor’s eye sockets were burning. He’d been staring at the spreadsheet for hours and hours. Doctrinally, “overwhelm” is defined as a situation where you are unable to manoeuvre, which means that “overwhelm” is always a choice. If you could choose to move forward, even unto death, then technically you were never overwhelmed.
If only the tactical metaphor actually worked for your emotions, Skeletor thought ruefully.
Finally, in utter exhaustion but out of a masochistic abundance of duty, Skeletor pulled up the Medical Readiness Reporting System to check all the command deficiency reports, dreading what he would find.
Two Bad the Two-Headed Evil Warrior was flagged as 50% Dental Class 4, because some Horde Navy dental captain scaled and cleaned the left head twice.
Hordak mandated that the Unit Non-Deployable Cap be set to 10%. BOHICA.
Skeletor worked the evil spreadsheet for three more hours but the math didn’t math and the evil just wouldn’t evil. He considered going on stress-leave. You can’t pour out your evil wrath from an empty cup.
It’s 0300. Skeletor should get some sleep.
At 0600 Skeletor had to get up and cut some orders. Try to find new perimeter guard patrol patterns, develop doctrine for assets he didn’t actually have and innovate on ever cheaper variations of the Fuck-Fuck Games Olympics.
The old Fuck-Fuck Games were over budget. He was almost out of black paint to paint the black rocks in the perpetual darkness around Snake Mountain blacker. He needed austerity Fuck-Fuck Games. Belt-tightening on the science of protective meaninglessness.
Skeletor won’t sleep well. He-Man gets to kill 40,000 people and transform back into Adam.
He-Man did it. Not Adam.
The Secret of Grayskull enforces compartmentalization and makes the job doable.
Skeletor wakes up every fifteen minutes crying and punching the mammoth bone headboard. It got to the point where Evil-Lyn bought some fancy earplugs. Good thing their pocket spring California King mattress minimizes “partner disturbance.”
Skeletor googled "yoga Dark Hemisphere" and closed the tab before even looking at the results. He wasn’t ready. Maybe he'll never be ready. But he saw Adam try, and something in the empty space where his face used to be remembered what trying felt like.