One day after another, one running of the Festival after another, the best possible future held only more of this.
Solaris, please. Send me a sign, if you can. Anything but this…
But “anything but this” was not her life to live, she accepted. Nothing short of Solaris himself descending from the heavens would change it now. Or some other miracle of the world. A force of nature, blowing into her life like the wind, to change everything.
She knew better than to believe that miracle would come.
Misty droplets pelted his face in the monstrous gusts. Holding tightly to the wing’s slat, the rotor roaring mere feet away, twin blades slashing through the air and propelling them onward through the rainstorm, he squinted, trying to see the end of the clouds.
The grey void spat more rain at him.
Sonic laughed, angling his head up at the sky. He relished in the brutal squalls; high above, so high above, the fierce wind in his quills like when running through the widest, most open lands down on the ground. If this was the doing of Soleanna’s god, trying to deter an intruder bound and determined to breach his people’s kingdom, Sonic welcomed the challenge.
The instruments inside the Tornado IV’s cockpit guided Tails through the gale. His illuminated controls, screens, switches and buttons spread across the entire console, the function of each imprinted clearly in his mind. Weather like this made him thankful he thought to design the T-4 with an all-weather cabin. Sonic seemed to be surviving, as he surmised from the fact that, through the kaleidoscope of rain rivulets streaking across the thick quartz windows, the blue shape still clung to the wing. Livin’ on the edge, as he liked.
Known for the unmatched beauty of its land, skies and seas, as well as the old-fashioned nature of its society, the isolated archipelago kingdom of Soleanna is just days away from its annual Festival of the Sun. While its avian people look forward to a night of national unity in the face of ever-worsening crises, Sonic the Hedgehog, with his best friend Tails in tow, is on his way to see the sights of a nation he’s never seen before.
Where Sonic goes, however, a certain mad doctor is bound to follow. Soleanna is the target of Eggman’s most diabolical scheme yet, and he’ll be damned if that blue nuisance comes between him and the first step to world domination yet again.
This time, speed won’t be enough to save the day. The gravest dangers to Soleanna’s people, and Elise, their beautiful but troubled Princess, come from within the kingdom itself. While Shadow and Rouge infiltrate the nation’s revolutionary underground on orders from G.U.N., Team Sonic will face their most harrowing journey ever, contending with Eggman’s army, Soleanna’s despotic regent, and the restive citizens of an outworn land on the brink of disaster.
Along the way, Sonic and Elise find something extraordinary in each other.
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