Raven stood leaning against the wall, looking into the darkness shaping outside the window of the VIP cabin. A tray with recycled tea and emergency smallcakes balanced in the air next to her, creating a titter more frequent than the consistent chug and crunch of the treads and the magic engine. Her face was limp, eyes looking at nothing in particular in the passing deadlands, teeth vacantly chewing cut up, still cold lips. A loud humming noise emerged from the section near the waypoint engine, and she took in a breath, levitating a small pair of glasses that lay on the main cabin table to her snout.
“Refreshments are ready as I thought you’d request, sir,” the unicorn said with a slight monotone to her speech, fixing up her collar. “Any prob—”
“Now, if I may, which I may, a refreshment would be less patronization, Raven,” replied the unevenly voiced, bemusingly rough-sounding, now only somewhat large unicorn, who emerged from the room. “And I didn’t, in fact, request anything.”
“I thought you would.”
“Which I didn’t, come figure that. Weren’t you the one to adore ending arguments with how we are all adults in here? Don’t you suppose I can, perhaps for just a little passing chance, handle myself, thank you very much? Not to start another, but this really is starting to become irritating,” the stallion spoke upliftedly, occasionally turning away from her and as if to someone else, as if a speech was being said, and even leveling his voice in accordance. She stared through him and out the window he was blocking, focusing on the vague shapes outside. Curiously, his head seemed to follow the same directions, occasionally making subtle turns as if to look at the sides. Two breaths would leave her nostrils and one breath would enter the mouth. The tray stayed where it was.
“We have already had a… talk that regarded that, sir,” the secretary said, putting the tray down on the table, near the unfinished game of chess they had been playing.
“Now, how did that turn out?” he pointed a hoof to her, staring right into her eyes, perhaps even drilling, if any of Prince Blueblood’s features could be given such an aggressive description.
“The… ffrrghhmmm… crew at the lead ran over the husk of some bovine creature and then we spent four hours disassembling it so it would stop wailing. And, as you may recall,” the mare rubbed her forehead. “It continues to scream every time we try to sleep.”
The bigger unicorn stomped his hoof on the sofa in a display of anger and, or, determination. Nervously, he looked left and right again, and shook his head.
“Then to finish it now! Raven, I see you are trying your best to keep this operation going, as it is a righteous cause that we have—”
The mare stared into the dark faraways beyond the window, breathing in the same manner. She would tense up and relax parts of her body to keep her mind occupied, and she would dart back and forth with her eyes to fuel the illusion of legitimacy. Once the volume had risen, a deep sigh left her, after which through her mind only other chants passed. In this limp limbo, standing in front of the factually to still be called Prince, her tongue and jaws moved slightly on their own accord, repeating to herself a mantra of sanity.
“The task. Only the task. The task. Only the task. She knows. She always knows. The task, only the task. She knows, she always knows” - it went something like this, Raven knew. She did not know, herself. Rarely was she in perceptive spirits when there was need for it.
Recently, the need was frequent. As Blueblood paced around the room, vocalizing, mimicking, and articulating, that need was all the more poignant. It became disastrous when the mismatched, odd, blabbering hunk of barely kempt, partly burned, somewhat scarred horsemeat walked right up to her and pushed an accusing hoof right against her snout. All too straight and all too primed.
“—RAVEN. RA. VEN. Raven, you overbearing… craven, you have ceased even pretending, haven’t you?”
He caught on. The problem had never been as clear as it was then, when Raven closed her eyes, fixed her glasses, and took in breath to make a response.
Her task was in jeopardy. There were several requirements, and through all the insanity that had been encountered, she kept it intact through nothing but luck and personal ingenuity. No hubris in admitting that. She was not Celestia’s own secretary for nothing. She considered everything. Even when thrown without warning, without truthful information, without even a clear definition of her purpose, to what emerged as a region the threat of which few things she had ever seen could match… she sustained it. But not even someone like her, not even with days of practice, warming up, conversationalism - plenty of time and practice to execute her psychology skills - could have predicted this.
Blueblood had changed. Blueblood was no longer who she was packed with, and no longer who voidly accepted that they were given escort of a number of ponies never before mentioned, to operate their vehicle never before registered. Blueblood stood in front of her, spoke understandable sentences, articulated, and was about to punch her in the snout. Even though his eyes went left and right, as if tracking some noise.
“I… I apologize. I haven’t been myself lately.” Raven nodded to him, and to her own words. “With the amount of time I had been dedicating to keeping you in good spirits, I forgo my own concerns sometimes,” she fully admitted the small fraction of truth. “You will forgive me if, after all that’s been… endured… I get caught up in my own thoughts.”
“Caught up in your own thoughts, is that right… Is…” the Prince sighed, and averted his threateningly, dangerously clear pair of eyes. “I… No, no, no, I will apologize.”
The secretary subtly sighed in relief, taking a self-congratulatory bite out of one of the smallcakes near the tea. The latter had gotten colder - quite a lot of time had to have passed for a hot liquid to cool down in a heatcage cup. Blueblood had things to say, it seemed, and despite having spoken for so long, had not reverted to a babbling mess that too much mental activity would normally leave him.
“It is now my duty to lead us through to the end. If I am to even pretend that what they call me is what I really am, your lot I must be able to manage. And yet I forget. That you work too hard, that Buster had not seen the interior of our vehicle for days now, that—”
Raven nodded and nodded, taking a seat on the circular sofa, which was now mercifully clean of the events at the start of the journey. The fabric got much tougher after the repairs, but it was no complaining matter. Granted, some parts of the repair process definitely were. She sighed at realizing that there would scarcely be a better time to bring that up than this particular talk. Still, she allowed the Prince to go through the list of all the engineering crew, one by one. That only rooted her worry. Everyone now had a name, and a problem of their own.
“I will be fine, believe me. This is all almost over, after all. Soon enough, there will be… no haunts, no possessed creatures, no possessed plants, no ruins rising out of nowhere, no hallucinations… Soon enough, all will be fine. You needn’t put in this much effort neither.”
“No, I need to. The work has only begun. Damned will I be if I let myself crawl back into the shell and… sit there. When we get to the border, and once the paperwork had been filled - and, I swear, I will oversee every last bit of it, too much there is that I had slacked on - then the real—” he nearly tripped on a bourbon bottle that had rolled from under their luxurious bunks, looking at it with hatred enough to make even Raven squirm. “The real work begins.”
With another deep breath, the secretary interjected.
“Then, since we’re so close…” Compulsively, she looked out the window, almost hoping to see the disfigured mountain peak of the city they were heading to, but saw nothing but the pitch blackness of three past noon and the curvy, grabby limbs and digits of the ruin and waste-interspersed forest. “You should know. Our engineering crew, who you spoke of in, uh, admirable detail. Prince Blueblood, we cannot trust them.” The mare took in an even deeper breath before he could say a thing. “There is something that needs to be done.”
The remark got him to stop and shudder in place. After a few seconds of silence, he lifted a hoof and rotated to face her.
“Now, you come again. What?” Blueblood looked right at her, his face bereft of much in the way of childish misunderstanding. It was regular somewhat adult misunderstanding now, coupled with frustration and the remaining symptoms of bodily and mental damage he had sustained. His mouth kept tense, uneven, and his eyes darted every now and again, their lower lids tittering slightly.
“So the stupid goat is taking it seriously now, good... “ Raven all but said out loud, but settled on: “Our engineering crew, all of them, they can’t be trusted, especially not by you. Not anymore.”
“B— Ho— No, no, that is nonsense. Why now, how come, and if this is merely a continuation of this silly childish feud you have been having with every single one of them for the past skies know how long…” The mare halted a breath, not having until then realized that the rather animosity between her and the rest was animated enough for him to notice. “Then we are having problems, Raven.”
“It’s… Prince Blueblood, for having turned into a thinker now,” she began to respond, struggling to contain venom. “You seem to have noticed that a group of alarmingly nondescript individuals have been on board with us, and have, so far, in this cursed environment, not been harmed, massively injured, or killed. And through all that, they pilot our vehicles, even though you might remember that this—” She could not help knocking a hoof against the floor to make her point. “—is not mass-produced, and, as such, the only ponies capable of operating it… Well, they do have to be on a level higher than a regular exploration engineering team, don’t you think?”
He did think, in fact, and for way less than she expected. Having considered that the time to keep explaining was bought, she opened her mouth, only to be sharply cut off.
“Oh, blast it all, why, of course, we have a whole contingent of specially trained assassins with us, and they have been dormant all this time to strike right when we are about to leave these… cesspits of freezing doom. Absolutely! Makes perfect sense!” the Prince proclaimed, and then stepped, quickly, right in front of her. “To an imbecile.”
He lowered his head to stare right into her eyes, covered by the new glasses. She noticed he still could not help passing a glance over the old pair, contained in her chest pocket. Awareness and memory. They seemed to work almost all the time for him, it seemed.
“And perhaps you had not noticed behind all the tea, cakes, other foods, and pleasant speeches that you had been making all this time, but I have forcibly evolved from that level. I am at least a fool now, thank you very much. I see through you, for how much you’d like to think otherwise.” He stared right into her eyes, and she stared back. A cold ran down her spine as his eyes were all too sane, sober, and clear. “Your interbureau affairs, or whatever nonsense it is, do not concern us when we are permanently five minutes from freezing doom. You will work with them, Raven, and you will enjoy it even, because unless you do, then we will all die, now won’t we?”
The mare’s mouth ran dry, but she responded.
“They aren’t assassins, but they will see you dead sooner rather than later. You’re mature enough to understand the concept. Apparently.”
“And how so? What’s a band of better-trained-than-normal engineers-with-survival-skills got against me? Someone put in the effort to send them here with us, and we would have been dead if not for them. This does not add up.”
“Our… directions, they are different. Listen to me, Prince Blueblood, just… listen.” She raised her hooves in mock defense, wishing that the ground given to him would invite the stallion to a position of weakness. That was the level of tactics that Blueblood required now. That bad.
“I have been for weeks now, and odd it is that I can scarcely remember all that much of them. Conspicuously, a lot of what I do remember is you talking to me. And then some horrors. Don’t think you’ll lull me into another hypnotizing speech, I know you have been doing that to pacify me, so that I wouldn’t go out and ruin something else. I hope that is clear. Have had quite enough trauma prevention speech therapy when I was a foal, thank you very much.”
The mare took a few seconds to blink again, having been, in fact, taken quite aback by the statement. With effort, she continued.
“In… short words, sir. When we were all sent here, there was never a notion of success with the talks to these… Northfolk ponies. It was all demonstrative. Both me and the “technicians” primarily had orders for the trip back, including if all went wrong, which, as you know, it did.” Raven chose words carefully, her chest pounding, and sweat finding its way on the glasses. “My orders are… to avoid disaster. To avoid harm from coming to Equestria.”
“Noble, right, very noble. So, to you we have been walking a knife’s edge all this time. Precarious,” the Prince mused to himself for a side note, allowing the mare to ease up a little, seeing how his remark was less barking and negative than expected.
“But theirs? I have looked into it, I’ve asked, and I’ve been directly told. They… have to bring back Prince Blueblood. And trust me, it does not seem like they intend to act on anyone else’s orders.”
“...and… that is bad… how?.. I mean, surely it’s odd that I’m singled out as much as I am, but I suppose my name has some value back there, to the… factual rulers, I suppose,” he mused again, and looked out the window, worriedly. She saw his eyelids flicker quickly.
“Sir… Honest question.” Raven played her card. “Are you quite sure that you are Prince Blueblood anymore?”
The staggered silence that answered her was the relief she needed, and the mare slumped down a little. Blueblood or no Blueblood, he was grown to have an ego. At last, an opportunity to play to it presented itself, if even in a perverted way like this.
“Well… I… am? I should be. And besides, what does it matter - all the agencies and bureaus under Equestria operate in the realm of paperwork, and as far as paperwork is concerned, I qualify. You’re not telling me that I’m some sort of bodysnatching ghost and you’ve been keeping me around just to make the reveal all the more shocking, are you now?” the Prince displayed a troubling knowledge of modern popular entertainment, or else simply made an unintentional reference. Still, by that point, Raven was wary of any display of uncharacteristic actions.
“You… would be surprised. Sir, listen to yourself. You’re talking of reform here, reform there, reform everywhere, you’re even taking command of our vehicles bit by bit. Are you entirely sure there’s going to be a place for that when you return?”
“Well, I don’t intend to ask!”
“...which is why with each passing day, you’re making yourself a problem.”
Blueblood stopped again, and had his eyes dart around some more. He took in a breath, but said nothing. She allowed for it to sink in, almost reveling in her victory. The rest of the plan was simple, if ghastly, but it just needed to be done.
“This… is… ugly.”
“We can’t be choosers, I’m afraid.”
“No, but… Look at all this,” the stallion motioned around the cabin, but most prominently to the windows which showed pitch blackness. “I… understood it when we wouldn’t get along, work in harmony, when there was just… dark, freezing death everywhere. None of us are impenetrable, we all fold down. I… I still wish I knew just how to bring everyone together, so that you stop… Being like this.”
She took a cup of tea and sipped on it, allowing him to continue. She had won, after all, so there may as well have been good cause for it.
“Because as you are right now… They won’t talk to you, they won’t speak with me, I don’t know what anyone is doing, you can’t stand them, and then you talk down to me. This is disorder. Chaos. Right now… you fit this place just fine, Raven,” he whispered in an astoundingly serious tone. “And you should remember. I want all of this purged. Gone. DESTROYED,” he shouted all of a sudden, banging his hoof against a chest where they kept the surviving bourbon bottles, and causing her to almost choke on her tea. “But what point is there if, even physically pure, you bring a part of it back with us? No point! Now, furthermore!”
To alleviate danger, Raven finished the tea.
“Now, what you tell me… I never really thought about it, but what if… What if Equestria doesn’t understand it either? The harmony? The… friendship, that they preach about, our Princesses?” The secretary’s eyebrows perked at the noxiousness of that word in his speech. “What you tell me is just ludicrous, there should be no need for it, how… UGLY is all of this? Can it… Oh, no, no, no, it can’t be that. No, we can’t have disorder of such magnitude there where it counts most - at our head! If, if this is true, then… then what do I…”
Raven did not finish the cake. Danger was very much, very, very much, not alleviated. It was magnified. She was far from victory.
“I… I would have understood if it was only now…” he started to mumble, while she began to rise, taking a subtle sigh, and trying to clear her mind of the thoughts of complications. “I mean, even now there’s something staring right at us, probably up on the roof—”
“What.” Raven said flatly, having barely come close to the shaken up Prince, let alone reached for her pocket.
“What? You don’t see it? We’ve had eyes piercing us this entire day, I’ve told you about it, but you just nodded, you—”
Her body froze up, and she squinted. Blueblood was disturbingly hard to read. It was his face. It was always a little worried, a little concerned, a little unsure, a little dumb. And just the fact that she was seriously considering him having read her moves this far ahead and acting to buy himself time... was troubling in and of itself.
“Are you messing with me?” she asked directly, taking a step in his direction. He did not move, himself, merely throwing his head back and forth, looking out the windows.
“I— Oh, this is ridiculous, are you telling me that YOU didn’t even hear them bloody well whisper by the ceiling? You’re the one who has the top bunk!”
“I…” Raven’s irises shrunk. She had not slept much that day, haunted bovine cries making it more of a problem for her acute mind. On hearing odd sounds within the cabin and not having anything outright disastrous happen immediately, she discarded the oddities as sleep deprivation. A lot of experience with it lead her to believe that yes, faint whispers after a week of three hours of sleep a night at most, under constant duress, did make you vulnerable. Only Blueblood slept quite well, and seemed to also be… receptive, as of late.
“Perfect! Amazing! Now we’re discussing political aggression and fundamental changes while there’s something right above us, and I was under the impression you thought it was under control! Raven… Raven, how is this… You… But you always… You always knew…”
It was when she looked at him and felt a pang of sorrow witnessing him revert to a state of childish hurt that the secretary realized - something had indeed gone terribly wrong. Not wishing to waste much more time, she had to take care of problems one by one. First in line would be something that could potentially end them all, which was less than optimal. Sure, it had taken its time, but there was no rhyme or reason to the Frozen North - assuming one counted out the prevailing coldness and deadness of it all. To be quick, she reached for a subtle lever at the top to pretend to open it up, but that effort was prevented by a more significant show of desperation and loss of control.
With a screeching halt and a loud bump of their leading vehicle against something very dense and thick, Blueblood was thrown on the floor, and Raven had to struggle to remain in place. The heavy, armored, mostly illegitimate military vehicle that they had in the lead (and which the waypoint engine was aiming for) had crashed into something it could not simply break through. That was bad.
“This is bad,” Raven confirmed to herself.
And then the top was opened by itself - it was torn, in fact, right off - just as the engine depowered itself, its automation deciding that now that they had halted, power field protection was unnecessary. The tough metal came off just as easily as it did many days ago, when local wildlife tore it open like a stairway jungle tiger a can of tin. Only, perhaps, easier.
Even before looking at what lay beyond the freshly torn hole, in the freezing blackness, Raven rushed to punch the alarm button that had been installed some days back, signaling the head vehicle that things were going rotten. Upon having heard Blueblood say a whispering “Oh you can’t be serious…” and turned her head, she actually punched the sturdy construct of plastic, rubber, and metal right into the wall.
Descending into the VIP cabin were three equine figures, and first came a singed, frostbitten, cut up, missing half a shirt, and glowing a ghastly weak green out the eyes and mouth, male goat. His mouth moved faintly, but produced no sound, and his limbs stuttered - he was as a puppet. Even with that, and the damage his body had sustained, it did not take Raven long to recognize the Capric deserter they had… acquired the lead vehicle from.
“Fucking hell,” the mare spat to herself, feeling her clothes up and scanning the environment, finding no objects remotely heavy or sharp enough to penetrate his hide. It was hard before, and now, looking at the two figures behind him…
“You know about us. Then no hiding,” said the somehow larger mare of the two, a towering hunk of thickly clothed muscle. Her bright blue mane hung tied into a long braid, which ended in a clob of hair that, even by look alone, could easily function as a morningstar. A long, sectioned, remarkably artificed spear sat attached to her back. “Time is up.”
As if the telltale towering physique and barely pony appearance did not say enough, the melodic, sibilant accent confirmed that these were locals. That had not been good news for twenty-eight days by then. Raven rearranged herself as quickly as she could, especially on seeing the other of the two. Fighting was incredibly suboptimal.
“What…” Blueblood spoke first, and that fact alone, on old reflexes, spiralled Raven’s panic into a new highlight. “What is the problem? What do you need from us?”
The secretary was barely relieved upon realizing that he had not yet made everything worse. Mainly because she was busy comprehending what the other mare was doing - it took a little belief at first, and then a lot of effort to suppress old thoughts of places much farther south than here, albeit perhaps only in the literal sense. The other mare, only slightly smaller, wore a similar coat, and her mane was a looser, shorter snow white, but it was not her appearance, or the weapon - a foreleg-mounted crossbow - that troubled Raven. It was that, from an outstretched hoof, a thick beam of green poured, and straight into the goat’s body. With this, the mare and the goat shared the glow of the eyes, only hers shone much brighter.
No horn on her head.
“We do what we should… Have done long ago,” the blue-maned mare fumbled with words, looking at the two tiny ponies in front of her. “We will be even now. Let us all rest easy.”
The mare made a mere few movements, and the spear was already hanging at her foreleg, attached by a barely visible cloth strap. Raven’s instincts tensed her up and began to calculate which direction to lunge in and what to do next, but somehow, again, Blueblood acted first.
“Halt! Let us know, at least! We’ve done something to you, I can tell, so let us at least know!” he spoke with mild hysteria, staring at the trio. There was no need for him to look back for Raven to understand - he was buying time. Worth little all in all, but it could not be underestimated in their current position. This was worse than wolves. More than that, it seemed to work.
The blue-braided mare hung her head and sighed. Raven made a few steps upon having seen that, but as soon as she almost got close, she opened her eyes and quickly stared at her. The secretary’s hooves planted themselves on the floor by themselves.
“I am Vårenträd. This,” she lightly pointed with the side of her leg to the other mare, who had remained static, as did the goat, all while looking straight at them of course. “is Viskavind. You had our husbands killed. Vildefløy and Vänsterfält were their names, but you never asked. You left our walls, and then we tracked. There is no rest without balance, without balance there is…” Vårenträd closed her eyes for a second, and nodded at the torn up goat. Now that he had been standing in the light for some time, she saw massive gashes on his side, and burns on the fur. Their torch was gone, it seemed. Even then… it was not theirs, no.
“Oh you fucking spitling piece of crap…” Raven muttered to herself, having stumbled herself onto the answer to what exactly the mare talked about. Twenty-eight days ago.
“We… did?.. We… oh… oh, we…” Blueblood, who had remained on the floor, albeit positioned in a more dignified manner now. “Oh bleeding hell, we did.”
“You don’t argue. Good. This is hard. If I can’t… explain… just know. It is past us. Let me find words. Vilde was better at your language than me,” the braided mare scrunched her large mouth. A special glance of the bright blue eyes was passed to the secretary. This effectively left only the “engineers” to come and rescue them, and somehow Raven was doubtful they were going to, if they were even alive.
“That’s… okay. I didn’t understand much when I first got here either,” the Prince told her in an oddly calm manner.
“You still don’t,” replied Viskavind and Morozov, their voices reverberating. The goat’s shifting, high-pitched voice was even shriller now, and the other mare’s almost masculine.
“Maybe.”
The secretary shut her eyes tight, throwing her head back and forth. The ridiculousness of the situation was starting to get to her. She had seen things others had not seen. She saw what Equestria needed the South for, and left a changed mare, a very changed mare. Regular mares were not accepted to be Princess Celestia’s personal secretaries. That was what she was to call herself, that is. Her duties even occasionally overlapped with those of a secretary’s, and all of them she had performed to the fullest. No questions, no hitches, no issues. She had a task, and Princess Celestia knew everything else. Go in, adapt, do as you do, and emerge successful. She was useful to her, she has always been, as she never would have been to anyone else, not after the jungle and the temple. No, no. Raven was special. Raven knew how bad things got. Perhaps… Raven was too proud.
So this was what it was for, perhaps. An impossible task in a land that even someone like her failed to comprehend. No win condition. Only varying degrees of loss, to show that nobody was impenetrable, and as insulting as possible. When even an inbred illegitimate imbecile sees through you and when what is dead and what is alive want the same thing. You with a still heart. Only what for? She had been useful. She would have remained so.
“There… has to be balance. You kill our lives. We kill yours. You ruin our homes. We end yours. You… leave our… fires… uncared for. We leave yours. A family without a husband to watch over the house when we are out is... nothing. But to leave a… spirit… is bad even for a nothing. It… has to be even.”
Neither Raven nor Blueblood had anything to say to what the mare had managed to put together. Not that it was incomprehensible, it was serviceable. There was just nothing for an option better than to let her keep talking - and even then, her and her partner looked worried, anxious.
“You left with nothing to live for. So are we. We looked for you. Tracked you down. You have a quiet trail. We thought it was good for you. But… we… half… wasted our time.” As both of the small ponies comprehended the part where their adventures had a “quiet trail”, a sad, bemused smirk spread over Vårenträd’s wide mouth. “Your lives are already empty. Done without us. We know, when you return, you will be like us. Nothing. But less… aahhh… dig… nity.”
“You…” Blueblood had opened his mouth, causing Raven to jolt through the same old instincts. “...may be right. We’re hopeless, all of us. And maybe even all of our kind. I just want a chance at changing them when I’m back. If I’m back. I don’t know if that matters to you. Suppose not.” Through all of that, he kept a clear calm tone, even if it took him visible effort. A thought in the back of the secretary’s mind told her that perhaps he had picked something up with all the politics going on in his old everyday life after all.
A sad chuckle emerged from Vårenträd.
“I wasn’t finished yet. You can have plans or no plans. None of us do anymore. We are equal. A nothing that is lost can’t be left to wander. We are not cruel.”
“You… are going to mercy kill us?..” The unicorn mare tilted her head, legitimately asking the question.
“Uh… yes.”
“Can we… take our chances with the wild, maybe? Don’t worry about the hole, our, uhhhmmm, friends in the other car can fix that.”
“No they won’t,” the big mare responded with a sigh. “Nobody will do anything anymore. Time is up, yours, ours too.”
“What do you mean?” Blueblood raised a hoof, as if in genuine concern - but for them, not for himself. Diplomacy 101 seemed to have rubbed off on him, even though he barely ever looked past the cover, it seemed. Raven nodded to herself, using the time to gather a better response.
“I don’t know how to say it in yours. You don’t know ours. Someone bad is coming. She was coming for you for a long time,” Vårenträd said, looking straight down at Blueblood. “She wants you for something. Something evil is happening. Nothing good will happen from this. We almost lost you. Only found him,” she nodded at the goat. “In time to… pre… serve… memory. Viska kept him to lead to you. She… She… is worse than a lost nothing. Please understand. We are all equals.”
Raven was awaiting Blueblood’s response, but instead only saw the Prince lower his head in… something that her gesture reading skills told her was understanding. That was distressingly odd, because she had no idea what was meant under “she” and how that could convince someone like him to so easily die. At least in front of her, Blueblood had not yet shown outright suicidal tendencies, his period with the blatantly mock-”smuggled” bourbon notwithstanding.
“You will forgive us if we don’t want to die just because you think someone bad is coming. That isn’t very reasonable, we’ll want a little proof, and we’ll want you to remove whatever you detoured the road with. This can still end peacefully,” the mare said. And in return, the bigger mare only grinned, showing off large, and sometimes sharp, teeth.
“That wasn’t us. I said we had no time. I was serious. Sorry. Wasted enough. Go wherever you southlanders go after you die. We won’t meet,” Vårenträd said, and began to aim the spear again, looking at Blueblood, who tapped his hoof on the floor, barely anxious, more nervous. Raven’s mind raced - she had to do something. Failure could not come just so easily. She scanned through so many thoughts, staring at the damned three, and thought. It was less than a second, but a long one, until she put it together. Based only on similarity and gut feeling, and on the little bit of face she saw of the Northfolk stallion whom she stabbed through the eye with that screwdriver all those days ago.
“You know, I killed your husband, you bluehead bitch,” the unicorn mare yelled as suddenly as she could, hoping the huntress in front of her could be halted by that. Fortunately, she could, and the two met with glances of faked mockery and mild disgust.
“You are stupid.”
“I killed both of them! Both the kills - right on me. You big ugly… THINGS, you aren’t as good as you think. You’re degenerates and mutants. I spit on your tradition and on your North, alright?” she kept yelling, looking for any sort of reaction, and pushing deeper in with any flinch. “No, you know what, I take out my fucking pus—”
“Then now we both have to kill you. You’re stupid. You’re wasting time,” Vårenträd said as the three of them were on their way to Raven, who realized that buying time for nothing in particular was not a good idea in such a small environment, and when the only saving grace was a stallion with no combat expertise.
“Wasn’t finished, you stinking ugly mutant factories. Fucking can’t believe that we could devolve into something this moronic. Yeah, no wonder you look like you took a brick to the face every day all the way to teens, yeah, that sounds right,” Raven kept talking, abusing all of her power to teleport short distances when they were about to get her. The odd whispery noise in her head that felt like it was coming from the horn clearly told that the magic destabilizer came offline with the engine.
“We don’t have to kill painlessly,” said the duo, and on the next teleport, by the bunks, Raven found herself right under the hooves of the goat. He stared down at her, expressionless. She shut her eyes one last time, and gave up. A gamble with a point decimal chance of leading to anything, but she had to take it. Good thing that she had not forgotten how to resist pain.
“Then back to the damn heart-taker with me. Sorry, Princess.”
Raven felt heavy goat hooves start to crush through her breast cage, heard the string come taut on a crossbow, and then a spear make a faint “whoosh” in the air, only ever so audible beyond the humming and wailing coming from outside. It was cold.
Then, with a grizzled roar and a brief moment of less cold, nothing happened but an unpleasant wet, crunching noise. The mare was confident that pain resistance was not that easy, as her experience would attest - and a pained yell and cough confirmed her suspicion a moment later.
“Southlanders are idiots,” Vårenträd said with disappointed frustration, soon unhearable over the pained whining and wheezing coming from Blueblood. “Now you’ve got us in trouble too. Wrong order... You are never worth it. Folk said we were soft, folk was right.”
“Våren…” Raven heard Viskavind say, Morozov weakly repeating after her. The rest was in their language, and obscured by the wind, and… the humming. The whispering in Raven’s horn did not get any better either. In fact, it got worse. She was really in trouble now.
However, that did not stop her from taking the opportunity. Despite multiple broken ribs, working of sheer defiance and hatred for the “engineers” who had left them to their own devices - or died - she opened her eyes, used the last of her magic to elevate the broken glasses out of her chest pocket, and lunged upwards. Vårenträd reacted very quickly, but not quickly enough, not for the animalistic strength and dexterity Raven pulled out of herself, and no doubt hampered by the frustration caused to her. It was all to some good, in the end, as the lower end of the glasses came off, so the sharp break of the two halves was just right enough to lodge right in one of large, bright blue eyes.
Before she could be hit by any rage kicks, the secretary hopped back, all of creation going numb, blank, blurry, and whirling at the same time. She went for another attack, scooting under the goat’s legs, and ramming herself into Viskavind’s. That did not throw the controlling mare’s stance off, but it did halt Raven’s roll, and the two’s reactions were just delayed enough that she rose up, feeling everything burn with each movement that concerned her chest, and lodge the other half of the glasses into one of the brightly glowing eyes. These ended up purple.
Raven was covered in… liquid, nothing was stable, everything swirled, patches of red encroached upon her vision, and every breath hurt. Her mind was staggered enough that the cries of pain were only a faint faraway. She looked at Blueblood, shuddering with a wide, gaping wound in the side of his chest, staring back right at her, a puddle of vomit by him on the bunk. A wide patch of jiggling red came over his eyes, in a manner unnatural enough for Raven to write that off as a thing of her own mind.
With no time for details, the mare’s mind scanned through opportunities and thoughts, bounced around by whispers in her horn and the mighty gusts of wind from the hole in the roof.
Saving breath for later, Raven made an excruciating leap upwards, pulled herself through burning hell to get herself on the roof, covered it with blood spittle, and entered a freezing hell instead. Her vision was all but gone, replaced by sheer blur, and only a consistent, thick, spastic red line crossing her vision. Perhaps a visual representation of her having gone into damage control.
She ran, into the crooked, snowy, freezing forest, and even when she collapsed, the red line persisted.
“She didn’t know, he died for me, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he died for me, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he died for me, what do I do”