//------------------------------// // [%timescale%][%%%+1], fragment four // Story: A mare and her dog // by cammera //------------------------------// "You-!" Punch "-Are-!" Punch "-Incredibly-!" Punch "-Annoying!" Twilight weathered the onslaught, her skin restitching almost immediately after being broken. She and the creature were falling, unheeding of the winds that buffeted them. "Will-" Punch "-You-"Punch "-Say-"Punch "-Something!?" She considered it, vaguely aware of the pain when one of her teeth cracked under her jaw's pressure and reformed. When they had nearly reached the ground, she opened her mouth: "You are--." The words, said in more than a layer of reality, resounded around them. The creature tried to deny it mutely, realizing what she had planned too late. "--under me." Both of the entities that composed her said at unison. There was a jerking sensation, an instant during which words and worlds were superimposed, before reality came up to speed to what was the new situation. "We are going too quickly, and the ground won't stop us," She felt the strain of not only replacing the exact coordinates of two objects relative to each other, but of effectively creating energy from scratch. Just in case, she strengthened her hold on its arms and closed her wings, her wings streaming vaporous magic that coalesced into what was, for all uses and purposes, jet propulsion. They hit they ground, the trail of her push alighting the buildings as they passed them. The first wall they passed was atomized info a fine, hyperheated mist, as was the second and third. The stone of the streets was merely plasmified, and they submerged in a hole that was filled with magma by their advance. She kept streaming speed, heading to what Cadance had once called their true home. The place were the earthly alicorns of the belonged. How would Cadance feel, if she knew what we plan to do? asked one of the halves, unaware of which it was. Don't know. Don't care. answered the other. But what of-- I. Don't. Care. On and on they went, deep into the earth, her plasma trail freezing into a solid black mass and sealing the tunnel behind them, the screeches of the creature as its body was destroyed faster than it could reform filling her with, she couldn't deny it, pleasure. At some point the air itself started to liquify from the pressure that came with the depth, but she cared little for it-- her current heat output, enough to strain her unicorn magic for the first time in what had to be decades, upset the particles and forced them to turn gaseous again, if only in a form that forced most of her internal organs to constantly restitch themselves from a fine paste. The ground hardened, their advance compressing it, and the problem made itself apparent: The faster their advance, the faster the compression rate. She'd need to be more practical. Her horn flared, the light alone making the liquidified air gasify at a faster rate, and she drove a energy needle forward directly through its body. The rock, fractured beforehand, was moved aside rather than compressed. They were reaching her destination when Green eyes opened, and a groan escaped tortured lungs. a green glint filled her vision. "No," she said, unbelieving. "I was..." The atmosphere mutated her words into unintelligible mess, but it didn't matter-- Both of the bodies present, mere anchors for intelligences that perceived reality from the outside, could see the words as they were formed and read their meanings with ease. Whatever they knew mattered little when they reached the worldbones. The veins of the world, the crystalline superstructures that cradled the magics of life, alighted her tears of joy like sapphires before the pressure compressed them into quartz-like salt crystals. The pink and blue mists of the airless cavern that hosted the veins burned their skins, far too hot for them to bear. "I won't kill you," she said, not bothering to normalize the atmosphere "I will trap you. I will make sure that you can't ever form another anchor, and--" "No!" It tried to escape, to overwrite reality into one where she didn't exist, but its tries were too blunt, those of an inexpert child. "--are forced to forever see the world from the outside, never able to interact with anything else." she continued, unheeding, both of her voices resonating for each other and the world bones. "Along my long, long life I will take immense pleasure in knowing that you are trapped in such a condition, unable to escape in your ignorance of the ways of the world." Invisible cords surged from the mists as she talked, its form dissolving at their contact "You had your chance of learning how to manipulate the world correctly, and you wasted it. You won't ever escape such a prison." It kept trying nonetheless, its face contorting with the effort, but here it was null. Even if it had had the knowledge to truly affect the world in any meaningful way, it was in Twilight's land, a place of birth for magic and life. Here, it couldn't see the world from the outside. Here, she had separated the anchor from its soul, condemning one to forever be blind, deaf, and dumb, and the other to see and hear everything without ever being able to touch it. The atmosphere of such a place was simply too charged to open wormholes, so she negated its energy for a moment and, horn alight, went back to the surface. There was a cracking sound just after she disappeared, followed immediately by twin screams.