//------------------------------//
// Manticore 
// Story: My Little Fortress: Friendship for the Blood God 
// by jaked122 
//------------------------------//

Tholumom Lathonudlerned has been content recently. He has mourned for the loss of loved ones recently. He has eaten a decent omelet recently. He has had an excellent drink recently. He has had the satisfaction of learning what an animal trap does. He has enjoyed combat recently.
He is slow to anger, but often feels depressed. He is not particularly sociable. He cannot find happiness in his work. He is not self-conscious. He is reserved.
He has a wonderful kinesthetic sense. He is very strong. He possesses an incredible endurance. He recovers quickly from sickness and injury.
When he is angry, his hands clench into fists. When worried, he tends to use threats.
His nose is broken. 
He has begun to wonder whether all this death is worth it.



The dwarf stumbled into the basement of Zecora’s treehouse. It was impossibly large; leading him to believe that it had to be a natural cave system that the zebra had tried to convert into a safe basement. His torch burned slowly on his helmet, to which it was fastened.
The light could barely penetrate a few meters into the gloom before it was snuffed out by the fog that precipitated from the bottom of the forest’s floor. There was the sound of rushing water nearby. 
The dwarf frowned. Zecora should not have tried to convert this cave to a basement, it was still very active in terms of animal life, in fact, it was worse than his own fortress’ attempt to turn their cave into a safe place. This cave was tainted, it was in a biome that was savage, the fog itself smelled of half decayed corpses. The dwarf considered Zecora for a moment, wondering if she was a witch, he brushed the idea aside, Zecora didn’t have enough books to be a proper necromancer. 
        The manticore in here was more than a normal manticore, it had to be undead. Anything that died in this cave would be brought back as a zombie in time. Those zombies would only cause the dwarf suffering. He could back out, but that would be an insult to his own honor, not to mention the honor of the ever-dubious Umbral Dyes. He sighed, this would be a bad job.



        The manticore screeched. It was not undead, the smell of rotting corpses was in fact from rotting corpses, not the necromantic magic that the dwarf expected. He could not say that he was relieved about the lack of undead manticores though. 
        The beast was as tall as most of the structures in Ponyville. Faced with a monster the size of a house, the dwarf was not particularly intimidated. The forgotten beasts of his world were far more toxic and evil than this thing, even with its scorpion tail and rather awful breath.  Of course, he thought, the knowledge that his race had defeated greater horrors gave him no advantage in the fight that he was about to take part in. He felt his mind slip away, the burdensome thoughts of the normal day evaporated under the pressure of imminent combat. His hands rippled across the weapon, finding the right place to hold the hammer. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. He opened his eyes, sucking in the darkness, he saw every detail he needed for the fight, no more. 
        He tightened the grip, closed his eyes, and let his cerebral cortex do what it did best: move. Left arm extend, angle upwards, apply counter force on torso. Legs retract, bear load, lean forward, legs extend. Calculate distance, leverage right arm, left arm down. Bear load, adjust legs, prepare legs for landing.
The creature screamed, but his memory captured it without context. His eyes saw the blood spew from the arteries of the beast, but never assigned any other sense to go with them. The blood formed the shape of a spear impacting the creature as it sprayed out. The scream formed a horror that could taunt the dwarf at any time without trigger, as it had no context.  The vision of the creature’s eyes glazing over as the last of the blood emptied out, the almost soulful stare, as though it had simply asked the dwarf why. Without context, the images of the manticore attempting to inflict wounds on the dwarf could not be held to be images of the same manticore that died, examining him as though he had committed a sin.
Death in this world, well, it bothered him. Back in the Ideas of Mourning, death was constant, expected(even if it was not welcomed), but here, the notion that death was just as constant plagued him. He had killed the other manticore, without the same moral crisis, without the same feeling of wrongness, but now, the contractual killing seemed something that should be abhorrent. The sensation was alien to him. There was noone else here to hold him up, to glorify his kill, which had been a product of a simple mistake, who would know that manticore urine mixed with mystery Zecora potion would end with the cauldron disappearing?
 It was his fault that he ended up killing this relatively innocent predator, which, despite his own omnivorous pride, he knew would end up hunting the more troublesome, smaller predators that might otherwise come to live in Zecora’s basement, and that he could not protect her from the wrath of the smaller predators as well as this very large one. He sighed, the basement was sketchy enough, now all that he needed to do before he would leave was to remove the liver, spleen, and venom gland of the manticore. Grudgingly, he removed the diagram showing where the various organs were from his pocket, Zecora really did want something more than manticore urine this time around. The dwarf pulled out a knife, beginning the grisly process.
He was still no butcher, cutting into organs that he would have wanted to avoid, namely the colon, the appendix, and the gizzard. How he managed to do this was beyond his own powers of failure-mode description. Each time, a new and terrible scent wafted out, distinct from blood, and each other.
 The Colon was unpleasant, but the smell of the appendix had an unsavory sweetness to it, maybe the ponies really did feed cupcakes to their animals, as the yellow pegasus said. That, of course, was silly, nobody in their right minds would bother taking care of the animals without a reason to do so. The gizzard popped, spewing the scent of rotting meat into the air. The dwarf grimaced, this was taking a lot longer than expected.
 The dwarf did obtain the organs that he was tasked with, eventually. The liver, spleen, and venom glands weighed him down as he returned, listlessly to the treehouse where Zecora eagerly awaited his return, or he hoped that she did. It would be cruel to kill a creature that, for once, had no desire to consume his flesh as its next meal, especially one that was a bit beyond the culinary tastes of the dwarf, or a common human, goblin, or even Elf. Perhaps if the dwarf put some spices on it and called it Goblin... 
The dwarf halted the thought with a strong disgust, he was already outside the tree, its windows glowing their ethereal shades of blue or green, or purple, but never yellow. He entered, the zebra was doing something or other, but Tholumom could barely focus on the area around him. In his deep thought, his eyes focused on one point, his brows furrowed, as though to help his concentration. When Zecora looked at the dwarf, she could have sworn that some kind of mountain was growing out of his head. 
“What seems to have happened...” Zecora did a short imitation of the dwarf himself, before continuing without a rhyme. “Are you okay? It certainly seems that you have not enjoyed what you said would be like play.”
“Why? Why Zecora, why did I have to kill that manticore?”
“So killing is not in your nature?”
The dwarf glared at her. “I was never like those kids at home. They were always talking about the ‘day when they’d get their first kill’. They were mad. I preferred to avoid violence, I think that I’ve forgotten about it until now. Those... Whatever.” 
Zecora believed that the dwarf should have been crying by now, “So you are not okay?”



The dwarf could barely walk, so as his race often did, when confronted with a philosophical dilemma, he sulked back to the library. The pouch full of bits that a guilty Zecora had given him jingled on his belt. He had gone into the Martial Trance before, hadn’t he? Tholumom’s nights as a child were often filled with stories of the warriors who came out of the Martial Trance victorious, wise, and powerful.
The dwarf had gone into the martial trance before. First during the Goblin Siege that resulted in the death of his wife, then during the fight against the soulless demons that haunted the bowels of the world. The first time, obviously, he had fought for himself alone; that was the function of the Martial Trance, its curse. It saved the life of an individual, but in that state, nobody could care for anything but themselves. And in this selfish adaptation of biology, the savior of the adventurer as it might be, it was beginning to take on a character that called to question the ancient reasonings of the dwarves.
If he was not a dwarf in his reasoning, what could he be? He didn’t worship demons, so he couldn’t be a Goblin; he did not eat the corpses of his enemies, so he would stand out as an elf; there were too many idiosyncrasies that made humanity an implausible option. No, Dwarves were relatively accepting of beings until they tried to kill them, unfortunately, the assumption that an unknown being was not in fact trying to hug you when it started walking towards any given dwarf was foreign to most of the surviving species as a whole. Was it his fault that he fell back on the evolution proven assumption of hostility. Could nature be blamed when the creature accused, the committer of a heinous injustice towards a relatively innocent party. 
Eventually, The dwarf gave up on the thought. There was little that could be gained by self reflection when there was no word for what his words brought him too, except perhaps for guilt. But the dwarf wondered, what could that mean? Was it a guilt about the manticore’s unnecessary death? The mercenary career that he had committed himself to without forethought? Or was the guilt spawned by his betrayal of beliefs? The dwarf shook his head, those were not issues that any being before him, after him, or even his peers could answer. The feeling he felt now was not congruent with the self-loathing aspects of his species, it was not the dreaded melancholy, which would invariably lead to his death by self-inflicted drowning.
His thoughts were interrupted by a shady pair of pegasi looking generally shady, if the dwarf wasn’t certain that they were only imitating the fashion of sneaking that goblins employ, he would be worried, they were doing such an awful job of sneaking, that, in fact, it was clear that they were trying to go for, what was it that the stupid human teenagers said, “Swag”? He would have written them off as ponies pretending to be pickpockets if it was not for the suits that they wore. 
Oddly enough, their sneaky-esque posture did not provoke the traditional Dwarven Response. Instead, he was intrigued by the fact that they had been following him, especially after he had entered the Library.
“Spiike! Would you mind preparing three of any particular type of drink which you are able to prepare?” The dwarf shouted.
“Does that mean coffee or-” The reply flowed out from the kitchen, carrying the dragon’s sense of bravado, clearing exposing Spike’s confidence about his ability to prepare sub-standard drinks for anypony that was around.
“Whatever it is, it will do. We have some guests.”
“Did Twilight say that you could boss me around however you like?”
“Yeah Spike. She did say that you were as much my slave as her’s.”
“I’m not her slave. What would give you-”
“Really? You do the housework, your catalogue the library, with the help of your overseer, you cook, you take letters and notes for her. You were taken care of by her after being snatched by Twilight at some point in the past-”
“Okay-Okay! When you put it that way my life makes a lot more sense. Does that explain why I love Twilight?”
“Stockloam syndrome.” The dwarf felt no need to continue his explanation after that awful reference.
“What?”
“Nevermind dragon! Make me some variety of foul herbal concoction to make your masters cringe.” 
“O-Okay...” Spike trailed off, backing off into the sink, where he was told to clean dishes by his mistress, uncertain of how seriously to take the new realization that he was essentially acting as a slave. 
The dwarf sat down at a table near the door. “So, do you ponies want to talk to me, or steal my children?”
One of the pegasi glanced over towards the dwarf, “We aren’t here for you. We are here to bring Miss Sparkle to an urgent meeting with Princess Celestia.” The pegasus stifled a smile at the strange creature, professionalism was apparently important, even when dealing with a relatively immature creature of unknown genus, species, or income range.
“Why were you following me around then?” The dwarf had seen the way that they skulked around, it was rude for any person to come in another person’s house, but government agents could not enter anyone’s house without some reason, or at least a strong familiarity.
“We weren’t, just because you happen to be staying here for a small amount of time, does not make you our quarry.”
“Okay then.” The dwarf, despite his belief that the pegasi was lying,  felt left out of the loop all of the sudden. It was odd enough that these government agents were not interested in an alien(who has been defeating beasts behind the border of the country), but they were interested in some kind of magical-savant-egghead with a horn and purple(or as she would refer to herself as “Lavender”) colored pony with no appreciable talent for anything beyond a temporary suspension of the physical laws of the universe. 
What could she do that he couldn’t? Other than the whole magic thing, nothing, maybe she can process grass in her digestive process, and she was purple, maybe lavender, either way she had a far cooler color scheme than his own pale skin with brown hair, brown eyes, and other relatively normal humanoid color schemes. Maybe she was a more interesting character, but why should that stop him? He knows that he can swing an warhammer, with extreme prejudice, occasionally even without any kind of prejudice. He knows that he is a not only a decent miner, but one of the best, probably better than that skill that Rarity probably keeps in a closet, trying to avoid(one whose special talent involves gems does not simply go around making dresses without them).
The other pegasus which the dwarf had failed to notice when he climbed up the stairs, returned with the purple pony in question. “So, Stalky Cloud, how has your family been doing?”
“Sean has been doing fairly well at his school, but I’m a bit concerned with Polly.”
“Really? I thought that girl was too nice to get into any kind of trouble, what kind of trouble is it anyway?”
“She’s gotten into parrots.”


“Yeah, but unfortunately the birds that we see around the Canterlot-Cloudsdale suburb are not known for their cleanliness. There’s been some bad cases of Southern Flu around there recently. I’m not willing to let her risk that infection, she could be out of school for weeks.”
“I’ll see if I can’t get Zecora to whip up something to help with that, Stalky. I’m sure that she’ll be okay.”
“I know Twily, but I can’t put the thought aside, you know as a father.”
“Come on Stalky, let your kid explore a bit, otherwise she might just join the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and we both know how that would work out for Ponyville.”
They both shared a long laugh. Tholumom’s jaws and eyes were open as wide as possible. How could Twilight have such a good relationship with a sketchy government agent.


Stalky looked back at him, glaring, “We didn’t come for you, but you are coming along.”
“Oh. Okay.”
And so the dwarf’s self-confidence and sense of self importance was suddenly restored.
If you happen to see any formatting anomalies, tell me, google docs is acting quite odd, as of late.