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Scar glanced behind him.
“Oh, there was a zombie back there,” he mumbled, seeing the aforementioned creature as it hobbled towards him, leather helmet guarding it from the sunlight.
Scar paid the zombie no mind, and turned back towards where he had seen Pearl fall.
“Pearl? I’m comin’ for ya!” he called. “I’m comin’ for ya! Where’d you go? ”
Scar climbed down into the ravine, but couldn’t see Pearl anywhere.
“Where’d you go?” he echoed, more subdued this time.
Scar heard a voice whispering in his ears. He didn’t know who it belonged to.
She’s dead, Scar. You’ve won.
Scar stopped. The zombie followed him, but he didn’t care.
“Oh. Really?” he found himself saying. “How’d that happen?”
Scar felt the zombie pushing, hitting, clawing at him, occasionally being battered back by the Thorns upon his armour, but he offered no resistance, lost in thought.
“How’d the guy with no friends win?” he wondered aloud. His thoughts turned to bitter laughter as he felt words stumbling out of his own mouth, indiscernible even to himself.
Scar realized he had far too few hearts--two--then turned to kill the zombie. It went down with relative ease, but that brought him to half a heart.
He gathered his dirt, and pillared out of the ravine.
Scar made his way forward, and began trekking towards the Secret Keeper.
“I guess the only thing to do is to succeed the task,” he told himself through his shock.
Scar made his way up to the statue, gazing at the buttons ahead of him.
Delicately, he reached out, pressing the button as gently as possible.
Scar looked up to the Secret Keeper, but turned his back to it, facing the setting sun as it stood in an otherwise blackened sky. A sky with no planets or stars, a sky with no moon.
He heard the whispers of the Secret Keeper, but they were clearer to him than they had ever been before.
Scar won! He really did it! he thought one voice was saying.
Other voices joined in the celebrating, while on the edges of his hearing he could hear the distant grumbles of discontented voices, who mourned for his fellows, wished another had won instead.
Scar paid them no mind.
The voices swelled, murmurings of single words strewn about, disorganized, before slowly unifying. Eventually, they settled upon one word.
Mercury.
He gazed at the setting sun, watching it disappear below the horizon.
Mercury stood alone, with no Moon, below the sky with no Stars, let alone other planets--Mars in particular came to mind as absent.
The very sky that the Sun no longer graced.
Mercury, Scar, whoever he was now, sat by the button that had once represented a harder task.
He sat, and waited, knowing the mobs would soon take him. But that didn’t matter, because even if he had no friends, even if he had been the villain, even if he had been a trader and a traitor alike, he’d won.
Mercury was a winner.
He’d won.
Scar could finally rest.