• Published 17th Apr 2016
  • 7,505 Views, 1,352 Comments

The Many Destinies of Sunset Shimmer - ratedoni



The rules of the game have changed; now, the multiverse has been born, but it is in danger of being extinguished. One spark can create a storm and one Sun is the key to survival.

  • ...
33
 1,352
 7,505

PreviousChapters Next
Sunset: The Hellblazer

Author's Note:

Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time ever I present you a chapter of the Many Destinies not written by yours truly, in fact, this dimension was presented by:

TheEquestrianidiot

Hope you all enjoy it!

A dirty Los Angeles sunset. Sun blazing all sickly as it sank into a band of smog. As the taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building, A woman gazed at the sullen colors of the sunset between the silhouettes of palm trees on the western horizon.

All that color in the smog, she thought. Funny how poison can be so pretty.

Sunset Shimmer - a lean woman in a long, shabby black coat, stub of a cigarette between her yellow fingers - got out and signaled trixie Lulamoon to wait. She was getting out, too: A young woman in casual a bad girl/punk look, with a very non-punk artifact in her hands: a book about Martinist symbology, written in French. Getting the signal to wait from Sunset, Trixie sighed, and nodded, leaning against the car.

One of these days, Sunset thought, going into the building, I’m going to take her in with me. What’s the use of an apprentice if she doesn’t back you up? But I’ll probably regret it.

She tried to draw on the cigarette, saw it had gone out, dropped it into the gutter, ground it out with his boot. She went into the apartment building, patting her coat pocket for another cigarette.

She lit a Lucky Strike with her ornate lighter figured with spiritual symbology.

Father Gregory was waiting in the foyer. A stocky, sweating, heavy-breathing, balding middle-aged man with broken veins on his red face, a priest’s collar. “I think… I think I found you one,” Gregory said.

Gregory still had his collar, Sunset observed. So the Church hadn’t given him his walking papers quite yet.

“I… I’m going to rehab, Sunset. In a month or two. They’re giving me another chance. Listen, I found you one - here.”

Sunset just stared at him. Poor Greg. Damaged goods.

“Look, I called you, right?” Gregory said, hands shaking as he wiped sweat from the tip of his nose. “Soon as I couldn’t pull it out myself I called you, Sunset.”

Sunset just shook her head and went through the door to the staircase. At the next landing she came to a small crowd of gossiping neighbors - Mexican, some Asians, a few Caucasians, all standing around and two people seated on the stairs: a white-haired black lady with her arm around a plump, tanned, shoeless bottle-blond in a suit dress, shivering on the stairway and hugging her knees, shoulders twitching at every sound from that apartment upstairs.

The distant shouts from up there, the agonized squealing sound, the sudden bangs. Sunset knew this was the kid’s mother. Nothing she could do for her here.

“It’s okay,” one of the women said to the mom. “You had to tie her down. It’s okay… “

She walked past her with barely a glance, continuing up toward those sounds. The exercise sharpening the burning pain in her lungs - pain that never completely went away. Knowing that the craving for cigarettes and the pain went together: one more in an endless parade of ironies in her life.

Hell. Was there any point anymore in following the doctor’s directions?

Even as she thought this, she had begun to do what she’d come here for. It was second nature to her by this time, almost instinctive: reaching out with the part of her that couldn’t be touched by sickness, extending supremely fine feelers from the field that surrounded her - like the unseen field that was around everyone, except that hers could be controlled. Extending feelers from her lifeforce - field upward, right through floors and walls, toward that room. And drawing back a bit at the furious response. That thing up there felt her psychic groping - and resented it. But then, it resented everything: all living existence.

She suspected it hadn’t identified her yet. It didn’t know who it was dealing with. She followed the feelers up to the apartment. The door stood ajar. She’d have known it anyway - she could feel fury as pure energy coming from it in waves, like heat from a house fire.

Sunset put her hand on the apartment doorknob-and the thing inside sensed her…

The building was quiet for a pregnant moment and then THUMP CLANG. ROAR! And the sound of shattering glass.

She entered the apartment. Stepping into the waves of demonic energy was like stepping into a sauna. Par for the course. But there was something unusual about this emanation. It was more intense, clearer, the wavelengths crystalline-sharp. Powerful.

She stepped over a broken chair, a shattered television set, and went down the narrow apartment hallway. She felt like she was moving upstream against an unseeable current. Her gut wrenched as the diabolic stench hit her like burning shit and sulfur and rotting blood, only it wasn’t really a smell in the air but in the mind.

The girl’s bedroom was beyond wrecked - everything was rubbled, smashed into small pieces.

The bedposts were snapped off; a toy box was kindling, dolls ripped to pieces; the dresser was splintered, its clothes shredded. There were several small puddles of blood. Some was the girl’s, judging by the state of her fingers, the red hand-marks smeared on the wall.

The girl was tied to the remnants of the bed. She made a repugnant rattling noise, like a hateful comedian imitating the last sound of a dying mutt, over and over…

She glared at Sunset. Her face seemed to shift within itself-

She had to look away. She’d glimpsed something she didn’t usually see in a possession, and she had a gut feeling it wasn’t smart to look at it directly, not for long. Sunset understood exactly what gut feelings were, and why you never, ever ignored them.
The creature in the little girl’s bruised, rag-fluttery body seemed to tense, as if about to tear itself free and leap at her - and then hesitated, sensing…

Recognizing Sunset, knowing how many of its kind had been repatriated to Hell, the dark spirit quivered in fear and fury both… and a wind exploded toward Sunset, generated by demonic energy, making her sway, nearly fall. She held her ground, and pulled back the sleeves of her coat and jacket to show the tattoos, the sigils on her forearms that seemed to writhe in anticipation of her retaliation.

The demon looked away at the sight of the tattoos, gathering its strength for a killing assault.

Sunset checked her watch. Then she strode across the room to the window - deliberately showing no fear, not watching her back. It was as much about the psychological as the psychic, and even demons had a psychology. She had to be in charge here. The demon would resist it, but Sunset already had the psychological leverage she needed.

Disliking daylight, the demon had left the curtains intact, and closed. Sunset drew them open with a sweep of her hand, and the room flooded with the amber light of sunset.

The light struck the girl - the demon - and she made that sickly rattling, that polyglot muttering, deep within her. Then, head shaking in a blur, she went to moaning, and the moan sounded like a little girl’s voice for a moment, before the seething voices, the roaring rattle returned.

Sunset kept her hands extended, letting the psychic energy flow through her - a particularly fine grade of energy called astral light by the hermeticists. She drew it from above her, into the back of her head down through her spine, out through her arms, so that the “feelers” with which she normally tested the psychic air became channels for divine power - which closed around the demon, contracting to hold it pinned… she didn’t trust those improvised straps. There.

That would hold the girl… it… just long enough.

Sunset lowered her arms, squinted against the smoke rising from the cigarette in her lips as she removed her coat and laid it aside. She coughed, took the cigarette out long enough to spit a little blood, and then took another drag. She laid the butt on the remains of a table, then took a key chain from her pants pocket. On it were house keys, keys to a car she couldn’t legally drive anymore, a Ralph’s Supermarket swipe card, and a set of small, very old silver medallions, each with an image of a saint. When Sunset got to Saint Anthony of the Desert, standing with one foot on the head of a gorgon, the demon reacted with a wet chattering glossolalia.

Ah--that’s the one, is it? Sunset thought, stepping onto the bed, squatting to straddle the girl.

Sending her field energy out along her arms, into her fingers, Sunset raised her hands, making the passes, the runic shapes, that directed the energy.

Then she snarled at the demon, so that its master - who heard whatever the demon heard - would know:

“This is Shimmer. Sunset Shimmer, asshole!”

She pressed the medallion against the girl’s bruised forehead. The metal began to glow red-hot, and smoke rose from burnt skin. The child - and the demon - screamed and convulsed.

All the time, Sunset was careful not to look directly into the child’s face as it flickered in and out of shadow - but seeing out of the corner of her eyes, she had an impression of the girl’s face alternating with another. One that should not be visible at all in the world of men.

The girl jolted on the bed, the bonds cut into her wrists and ankles, and then her eyes snapped open and Sunset found herself looking into them as the demon in her snarled, “¡Todos nosotros vamos a matarte!’”

The pot calling the kettle black, Sunset thought, holding the girl down with one hand while she pressed the medallion with the other as the girl’s body shimmied on the bed…

And then suddenly she went limp. Lay still, as if dead.

“What the hell?” It shouldn’t have killed her. The thing should be fighting for a while yet.

She leaned forward to look at the girl's face - and something jumped beneath the skin of her neck, up into her face, distending abruptly malleable jaws so that they jutted forward, as if trying to gnaw its way free from within…

Sunset recoiled - and the demon kept coming at her, lifting the bed frame off the floor telekinetically, arms outspread in the now-upright frame like a mock of the crucifixion; like a wolf dragging its cage, it came snapping at Sunset's face with its unnaturally outstretched jaws.
The demon roared and foamed at the mouth and contorted, beginning to shake the bed frame apart…

And Sunset, swearing-old-fashioned obscenities and not incantations - stepped in and punched the girl hard in the side of the head with her right fist.

She gasped, her eyes rolled back - and the girl, bed frame and all, fell backward, out cold.

Heart thumping, dizzy, Sunset became aware of voices behind her. She turned to see a small crowd at the half-open door. Several men and a woman, mouths and eyes wide open, staring.

Sunset hoped they’d seen more than her punching a little girl. But if they had, there was no condemnation. Just horror as they stared at the unconscious child.

Sunset knew how to take control of dazed people when she had to. “I need a mirror. Now!” She turned to look at the girl. “At least three feet high! Move!”

The three men looked at one another, murmured, then ran down the hall. They ran to the nearest apartment, didn’t find a suitable mirror, hammered on another door, and thundered inside, making an old woman shriek as they tore a big floor mirror from its stand and raced puffing back up to Sunset with it.

Distantly aware of all this, Sunset went to the window and shouted down to her apprentice, still leaning against the cab.

“Yo, Trixie!”

“What?” she shouted back.

“Move the car! Your cab, move it!”

“What? Why?”

“JUST MOVE THE GOD DAMN CAR, TRIXIE!!”

“We got your mirror!” shouted the burliest of the onlookers as they wrestled it through the door. Sunset turned and took the big oval wall mirror.

--
Down on the street, Trixie glared up at the window and then snorted, shaking her head. “Park the car, move the car.”

She got into the car, shifted into reverse, moved it a few feet backward, and parked it again.

“There, fuck it, Trixie moved the damn thing.”

She turned the engine off, and went back to her book.

--

Sunset had the heavy, wood-framed mirror tied with drapery ropes to an inert ceiling fan so that the mirror dangled above both her and the twitching, semiconscious girl. She was lying there with her eyes shut, the demon dormant within her but coming to life again. The mirror hung glass-downward, parallel with the bed. The other men stood nervously to either side, steadying it.

“Close your eyes,” Sunset told them. “And whatever happens, do not look at her….”

Sunset put her hands over the girl’s eyes just as they began to flutter open. She intoned in a rapid whisper, “In nominee Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti extinguatur in te ominis virtus diaholi per…“ She could feel a change under her hands. The girl was coming to.
“Impositionem manum nostrarum et per invoctionem gloriosae et sanctae dei genetricis virginis Mariae…”

Someone whimpered close by - not the girl. She turned to see one of the tenants, a middleaged man staring straight at the girl’s face.

“NO!” Sunset barked.

It was too late, the man backed away, wide eyes filling with tears, sobbing. “Oh no… “

Without him holding it, the mirror tilted. The men moved to reposition the mirror, but the damage was done. She began to wrench about under Sunset her face writhing under her fingers. She broke free of the straps, snapping them like strips of cardboard. She began to levitate and she just managed to keep her hand covering her eyes. The demon grabbed Sunset around the throat, squeezing, fingers becoming talons. But Sunset was thinking about those miraculously distended jaws and what they’d do to her hand. She felt its jaws swelling… then her breath shut off.

Okay, it has to be now, Sunset thought, or you’re going to be choked to death by a little girl.

“Smile pretty, you vain prick,” she said to the demon, and slid to one side so she didn’t block the mirror, whipping her hand away from the girl’s eyes. Mentally, she commanded the demon, Look!

The girl’s eyes fixed on the reflection in the mirror… and Sunset looked too.

What was reflected in the mirror had nothing to do with a little girl. It showed a head whose most prominent feature was what it was missing: The top of its skull was sliced away at the eyes.

Demons had no need of brains; they took orders, and they were pure instinct, pure appetite, driven by the lower-body impulses; it had distended jaws bristling with needle teeth. Gaunt, scaly limbs…

And the little girl suddenly sagged back, panting with relief: The demon was now trapped in the mirror glass. Trapped but not surrendering yet - it thrashed and clawed to escape the reflection, heaving its force against the mirror from the looking-glass world, the frame and glass beginning to crack…

The demon was starting to come through, fighting to get its body into the material world. And that, Sunset thought, was against the rules.

“Pull that rope, now!” Sunset shouted.

One of the men jerked the dangling rope end so that the mirror swung toward the window - and instantly got stuck in the jamb.

“No you don’t,” Sunset snapped.

She jumped up and pushed the mirror free, shoved it out the broken window so that it fell free of the rope, plummeted toward the street, turning end over end.

She had a glimpse of the demon staring out of the cracked glass at him as it fell away, and Sunset flipped it the finger. “For your boss!”

And then the mirror fell directly onto the hood of Trixie’s cab, denting it deeply, the mirror glass shattering on impact, showering into countless glittering pieces. A repellent rattling sound reverberated away from the fragments… carrying with it a reptilian stench… away, away, the demon’s astral form flitting invisibly into the city’s gathering night.

In the cab, Trixie stared at the broken glass, the smashed wood - and her dented hood.

In the girl’s bedroom, Sunset was untying the bloody remnants of the straps when her mother came in.

“Mama!” Her mother gathered the child up in her arms, rocking her.

Sunset checked on the man who’d looked into the demon’s face: he was lying on .his back, staring, twitching, muttering. Something broken in his mind.

Gregory had crowded in, too, and was clearing his throat. “Ma’am - about the money…”
Sunset picked up the stub of her cigarette, no longer burning. Feeling like she might fall over if she didn’t keep moving, she put on her coat and went into the hallway, to the kitchenette.

Her stomach was churning, seething. She hadn’t eaten today. Just something, anything, so she didn’t throw up.

There, a quart of milk in the fridge. She sniffed at it, drank deep. A soothing hand covered the interior of her stomach. She put it back, closed the fridge, and found herself staring at children’s drawings held by refrigerator magnets. All the same. A crude figure, arms outspread, another figure poking at him with a stick. Stabbing him in the side. More on the walls. The mother, though she must have been puzzled, had put the child’s obsessive art up as a point of pride. She pulled one of the images off the wall, tucked it in her coat, and pushed past the tenants again, out to the corridor, coughing as she went.

PreviousChapters Next