Bowser Jr. had not been pleased when he’d been told Kamek was too busy to see him.
“Tell him he’s not busy anymore!” he’d barked. “This is urgent!”
Since his childhood, Bowser Jr. had more than doubled in height. The Koopa trembling before him was reminded vividly of the old king in his prime.
Still, his fear could not change his answer.
“I-I’m terrible s-sorry, Your Surliness, but Kamek gave us strict orders not to interrupt him for any reaso-”
He hadn’t even finished before Bowser Jr. rose to his feet with a snarl of irritation. The Koopa yelped and ducked into his shell, but the shell only bounced and clattered harmlessly against the floor as the infuriated king strode past him.
Junior knew there was only one line of work that would keep Kamek from seeing him, but he was determined not to let his old caretaker escape. The castle was as imposing and hollow as the pipes of an organ, and many of the souls living there heard the reverberating booms and crashes of their king’s progress down the twisting castle steps.
Junior burst through the doors to the basement lab, and squinted against the flickering solar flare he found there. The mass of incandescent orange and yellow lights flashed with a brilliance that tore through the eyes like butter and seared the tissue of the brain.
Silhouetted below this agonizing light show, a small cutout in black threatening to be drowned out by the dancing aurora behind it, was Kamek. The round, black goggles over his eyes held a double image of the dancing beam as he flicked his wand and gestured his hand in an arcane pattern of commanding loops. The magic circle on the ground turned steadily on the floor before him, each facet of the ring sending forth a magic chain to wrap tightly around the outraged light. The tightly-wound chains warped the shape of the light until it no longer even remotely resembled a star, just a rod of crumbled, warbling energy.
It was these chains, this circle, that kept the Havoc Star contained.
The Star, as always, emitted a high-pitched wailing that pierced through the eardrums like a dentist drill, but even so, Junior’s booming voice was able to cleave through the noise.
“Kamek! I need to speak with you!” he roared.
Kamek turned, indignant.
“Your Majesty, this is a very delicate operation!” he screeched at the top of his voice. “Wait outside!”
“NOW, KAMEK!”
Kamek frowned. Even over the earsplitting noise, he recognized that tone. He had heard it for decades from Junior’s father, and he had heard it for decades from Junior himself. Kamek feared Bowser Jr. no more or less than he had when his ward was smaller than himself, but he knew no amount of reason, wisdom, or basic fact could prevail over that tone. It was a commanding voice accustomed to shaping reality.
Kamek flicked his wand, and a bubble crisscrossed with geometric shapes enveloped the chained Havoc Star. The siren-like wailing was abruptly choked off and the flickering glare dampened by the slowly turning bubble.
Kamek lifted up his goggles with an unimpressed look and fished his glasses out of his robe. “I suppose if not blowing this castle sky-high is so unimportant to you, I can spare a few minutes,” he said dryly.
“Can the sass!” snapped Junior, “I need to ask you something.”
“Well, what is it?”
Junior stepped further into the room. The ceiling entered Kamek’s range of vision as he looked up to meet his gaze.
“Do you remember when I was a kid, I asked you if dad was a bad person?”
Behind his glasses, Kamek’s eyes narrowed. He had not been expecting this, but he wasn’t surprised, either.
“Yes, what of it?” he said.
Bowser Jr.’s voice was stern. “You never gave me an answer,” he said.
Kamek huffed. “As I recall, Your Majesty, I told you you would have to determine the answer for yourself.”
“Like I said, you never gave me an answer.”
Kamek snarled in irritation. “It wasn’t my place to judge your father’s actions.”
“I’m asking you to,” snapped Junior. “So answer.”
Kamek threw his arms out. “What, you can’t make up your own opinion? You need me to figure it out for you?
“Will you stop DANCING AROUND IT?” With a roar, Bowser Jr. slammed his fist into the lined shelves of glass bottles. Shards of sopping glass spun over the floor. Kamek felt a familiar cold shill race under his shell, and he shrank down.
“The entire world hates us, Kamek!” Junior thundered. “The entire world! They call us monsters! People are killing themselves to get rid of us! You don’t do that for things that are good! Do you?”
Kamek bristled. “Well, you seem to have made up your mind, so I don’t see the point of asking me.”
“The point is you lied to me!” Junior roared. “All the time I was a kid, you made me think we were doing something right!”
“When did we lie to you?” Kamek spat. “When? When we told you we hated Mario? That was the truth! When we told you we wanted the Mushroom Kingdom? That was the truth! What part of what we said was a lie?”
Junior faltered. He had been so full of righteous fury as he’d thundered down the steps, so sure that he had been wronged. He knew he had been deceived, but upon Kamek’s words, he inexplicably found himself put on the spot. He floundered, groping through his memory for anything definite, anything unmistakably duplicitous.
“He... He told me Peach was my mother,” was all he could manage.
Kamek snorted. “Even as a child, you didn’t believe that! Are you honestly telling me that little white lie is why you barged in here? You can’t fool me! This is about that girl, isn’t it?”
Bowser Jr. felt suddenly as though the front of his shell had been ripped open, exposing something raw and quivering underneath.
“She... She has nothing to do with this!” he yelled, and he couldn’t stop the shaking in his voice.
Kamek snorted again. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I know exactly what’s going on here. You were content to sit on the throne your father won for years, and then all the sudden that girl appears and flashes you that arrogant smile and you want to throw it all away!”
“It isn’t like that!” Junior felt his cheeks burning with a heat that had nothing to do with the captive star or the embers popping in his own throat.
“Now who’s dancing around it?” Kamek knew there was a decent chance he would pay for these words later, but he had seen the troubling signs of interest in the young king, and he knew them all too well.
“Your father spent years running himself ragged for one woman! He hasn’t even glimpsed her face for years, and the thought of her still haunts him! Do you want that to happen to you? You think that girl will ever accept you, stand with you at an altar with a bouquet in her hand? Give me a break! It’s a fool’s errand! It always was! You can’t win her! Crush her, throw her away, and forget her! It’s for your own good!”
In his mind’s eye, Junior saw her. The girl with the wild, brown ponytail. The girl with the bold brows and flashing blue eyes underneath the brim of her pink cap. The girl who’d once said to him, “You are standing in between me and my throne.” Then she’d said, “I’ll be a better kind of ruler. That’s why I don’t want you to get hurt.”
And then, she had said: “You deserve to be free, too, Junior.”
“I... She’s not... We don’t...”
“Very well!” Kamek shrieked. “If she really means that much to you, then by all means, run away with her! Bend down on one knee, offer her a ring, leave all this, your castle, your subjects, your family, leave it all behind! Abandon your father and tear down the home he built for you! Everything else has abandoned your father, why shouldn’t you?”
Junior winced. He couldn’t help it. “I never said I was going anywhere!”
“Of course you’re not! Because you’re not an idiot!” Kamek thudded the bottom of his staff against the cavernous floor. “You ask me about right and wrong, good and bad? You’re not a little boy anymore. You should know by now that there is no distinction. Good and evil are just words to dress up ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Tell me, do you truly feel it’s ‘right’ or ‘good’ to turn against your family?”
Junior looked away. He thought of his aged father, ailing, bitter, consumed with obsession and rage. “Torch that little brat!” he’d roared. The “little brat” who fought so ferociously and, every once in a while, smiled at him so kindly.
It was true. He wasn’t a little boy anymore. It had been a long time since he’d thought of Peach as his “Mama.” It had been a long time since he’d thought of Mario as a “bad man.”
But his father was still his father. And his father was alone.
A low, rumbling snarl poured out between Junior’s teeth as he abruptly turned to pound back up the stairs. Kamek blew out the huge breath he had been holding in and flipped his goggles back into place.
Doubt was a new thing. His father had never wrestled with doubt. Kamek was too old, too set in his ways to change course. He hoped he had convinced Lord Junior the same, but he was not fool enough to believe it. He knew better than anyone of the obstinacy of the young.
Junior, for his part, found himself stopping partway up the third staircase. He knew he couldn’t abandon his father. But forget her? He might as well try to detach his own arm. Every time he saw her face or heard her voice, he would think of the sad look in her eyes when he’d...when he’d offered her the kingdom.
“We could rule together! It doesn’t have to be like this! I’ll take care of you, Stella!”
Did Kamek know about that? Did he know that he had already tried the “idiotic” thing Kamek had railed against? Perhaps, by turning him down, she had proven herself to be less idiotic than him.
“That won’t work, Junior. Don’t you see that?”
He could never kill her. But if she had made up her mind to fight, then he would just have to beat her. He would thrash her so painfully, so completely, that she would retreat and never return. It was her only chance.
For a moment, he imagined a scene from a different world. Mario was alive. Junior was still a kid. The stands surrounding the tennis court were filled with cheers and banners. And Princess Peach, still lovely with her golden hair that tumbled below her waist, pulled forth a squinting, brown-haired toddler as she smiled down at him patiently.
“Junior,” she would have said, “this is my daughter, Stella. I hope you two can play nice, at least for today.”
Junior shook his head and pulled himself further up the stairs. That had never happened. Don’t torture yourself. You know the way things have to be.
For the remainder of the day and all through the night, the castle was quiet.
