Imbalanced: New Age

by Nameless Narrator

Chasing a Dream: Cuddled

[Blazing's Entry]

Did I fail? What did she mean? Crom is alive and there are ponies left in the world which wouldn't be the case if Harmony won.

Did we misinterpret Harmony's return? No, that's impossible. The god discovered Discord and Nightmare were weakened by the repeated use of the Elements, sent his will through time and space to touch the mind of a madpony and offer him power. The madpony wanted revenge and Harmony gave him power outclassing all other living beings including alicorns. For that, the god wanted his new 'avatar' to arrange for his return. Since Harmony was locked up in the emptiness outside of reality, that took some effort and led the avatar to a sacrificial valley west of White Tail Woods where an ancient and extinct civilization used to worship horrors from the stars and shattered the protective veil around Equus.

Their successful summoning and extinction are 'loosely' related.

All that was left for the avatar was a ruined sacrificial pyramid. He and Harmony's cult he built around himself, his followers blinded by promise of power and status, built several devices allowing to rip the weakened protective veil once again and guide the god back home.

Cromach, I, and two groups of members of the Order of the Silver Sun got there just in time to stop Harmony's second coming. At least that's what we thought. While Cromach and I occupied Harmony's chosen one, the others destroyed the guiding devices guarded by Harmony's cultists. That's where it should have ended... but Twilight Sparkle happened.

With the avatar about to die, Twilight arrived and used the Elements on him. Celestia didn't believe the entity we were attempting to stop was Harmony, the lying god pretending to be the ally of ponies. The avatar drained Twilight and the other Element bearers of power, and ripped the sky himself. The god was already there, waiting to enter our reality again and usher new era of 'perfection'.

The problem is that gods cannot create more gods, and Harmony is no exception. His nature of evolution, driving will, and pure existence made him seek a way to create the perfect being, immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, better than he, the original force, himself. Nonsense. His best idea was sort of a hive existence with no individuality able to survive almost any catastrophy as long as one part of the system survived. One world, one being, one eternally insane mind still unable to bear all knowledge. We had to stop that.

After Twilight's intervention all seemed lost, but Discord and Nightmare's help allowed Cromach and remaining Silver Sun members to defeat Harmony's avatar while I slowed down the god's progress through the torn rift. Nopony else could have done that, only I and my special talent of stealing the power of others. I balanced forces no mortal should possess to stop a force nopony should ever face.

I was never in a position to win, but I slowed Harmony for long enough. With his avatar gone, the rift started to close with Harmony's monstrous form of tentacles and eyeballs still in the middle of it. That's when I went for my final gambit. If Harmony just returned to the void, nothing would stop him from repeating the process. I used his power to keep him immobilized in the closing rift. He realized he was doomed, so he stopped trying to escape and decided to take final revenge. Using my special talent against me, Harmony poured all his purifying power into me. The last thing I remember is white, agony, and fire.

If what Desert Shade said was true, then there is only one griffon who knows what happened next in full detail, and that is Cromach.

[End Entry]

---

"Don't do anything aggressive or we're all dead or fucked, literally," Desert Shade hisses as the prowling shapes surrounding the hill start climbing up.

"What are these Corrupted or whatever?" I whisper. Aside from their size and unusual appendages, the pony shapes closing in don't seem too threatening, "Can't we run?"

"You?" she gives my fractured leg a cynical glance and shakes her head "No, they are vastly faster than ponies, they don't get fatigued, they can heal wounds almost instantly, and they can make a pony turn to their primal instincts of mating and hunting very easily. These guys took over Equestria for over a century and turned most living things into themselves. I don't know what you can do, but I implore you just to listen to me and don't fucking move a muscle!"

Lying on my back, still dizzy from the calming potion, I really like that course of action.

"Lyam, throw me your bag, the one with the berries," Des's hushed voice makes the Corrupted already on the hilltop bare their teeth and wobble the tentacles coming from their backs.

"What happened to no quick movements rule?" the griffon answers, toying with the requested backpack, "Yo, Scroll, levitate the thing for me, will you?"

"On it," the unicorn mare's horn shimmers, and one Corrupted tilts her head as the bag floats past her.

Rolled Scroll's effort unfortunately makes one big Corrupted stallion with long muzzle, jagged tail, and talons on his forelegs circle her and sniff the air. He wraps his tail around her legs, and his tentacles slither over her barrel. The entire gesture doesn't feel hostile, more like... more like a cat's whiskers getting the feel of the surroundings. As his nose gets closer and closer to Scroll's behind, I hear her mumble to herself over and over:

"Please don't, please don't, please don't..."

Desert Shade said something about reverting a pony to a baser nature, maybe a sexual act by the Corrupted forces its victim's libido to go into overdrive?

"Could be, he doesn't seem intent on attacking her or anything, just likes her backside."

Small, toned, definitely not my type but not bad. At least these Corrupted have decent taste.

Our visitors come in various shapes and sizes, but there are similarities. Most of them are slightly bigger than ponies, sleek and sinewy, have longer legs, and prowl noiselessly even through the rippling grass. Two, a stallion and a mare, are enormous, both a head taller than Lyam and even broader. Where the smaller ones are on the skinny side, although almost jokingly curvy in what a pony would call the right places, these huge ones are muscular, not as quiet, and positively looming. The final shape in their center is a chubby mare, but one who would easily make a pony go crazy with just a wink and a wiggle of her plot. The tracing spell confuses me about her gender for a moment, but the dangling things between her hind legs are swaying, full teats reaching past her knees. All Corrupted, no matter thair other traits, have a distinct, even overdone, sexual undertone to their nature. Stallions look powerful and dominant, mares curvy and fantastically built while retaining fit posture.

Oh dear, the chubby one is walking straight towards me. The good thing is that considering my track record with mares, she'll just give me an annoyed look and go for Lyam.

"Or not, aren't you one lucky alicorn these days?"

I hate you, me.

The mare sniffs me, runs her wet and hot muzzle through the hair on my barrel, and makes me shiver from my hooves up and gasp. The sound makes her flinch, but she lies down by my side and starts licking my splintered foreleg. It hurts, but I try not to do anything dumb, as Des said. The pain slowly fades and the unnaturally bent leg loses all feeling.

Crunch!

"Glad you didn't feel a thing, right?"

"Whwmwhm..." I stare, eyes wide and whimpering, at the leg now hanging only on a strand of sinew and the splint. The Corrupted resumes her crunching and grinding of the bone she bit off. Her three tongues lather a thick strand of gooey saliva where the two separated pieces of my leg connect. The leg twitches and I groan as fiery ants rush up and down, giving me a good idea that the blood is returning to the reconstructed limb. Pushing myself upwards carefully not to offend the unexpected help, I experimentally swish the leg up and down.

It's... healed, not even painful or stiff? Fully healed.

"Ummm, thank you?" I mumble, running my restored leg's hoof down her neck.

As I touch her, my monochromatic world lights up with colour. Her coat really is black, not just a trick of my dark world of white outlines, but the inky surface recedes as faint phoenix fire surrounds the place where I touch her and burns the blackness away. She's dark purple underneath.

My head spins, and I need both my forelegs to prop myself not to fall. The Corrupted mare's tongues lick my face once and then restore the taint I burned away in an instant. She lowers her muzzle to my side, and for a second I hope she'll take care of my wings as well, but she just lies down and eight thick tentacles from her back lenghten and wrap me into a tight coccoon. All I can do is thread my leg under her neck and embrace my current fate.

It seem I've just been claimed by a soft sexy pillow with healing powers. I like it when nopony is trying to kill me. Rare but refreshing.

Desert Shade's confused and somehow still intense glare is amusing beyond belief. Then it looks as if something clicked inside her, and she rummages through her bag, taking a rectangular box out and opening it. The male oversized Corrupted watching her raises his leg. That guy doesn't need talons on his forelegs, those hooves look as if they could crush coal into diamonds. Desert Shade offers him a small sphere that to me looks like a combination of magic and divine power. I have no clue what it is and make a mental note to ask her later. The Corrupted eats it and I see white ley lines of energy spread through the groud towards all the other Corrupted around. Des gave him some sort of food, and he shared it with the others... through the soil?

All around us, the Corrupted lie down in groups like hunting dogs warming up their master through the night.

"I don't know what this is, but I pray to all stars above this lasts," Desert Shade mutters much to the confusion of her humongous watcher. She walks over to him... and curls down on the grass. The Corrupted almost instinctively joins her, spooning the mare less than half his size in a protective embrace.

Four of the prowling ones surround Strong Back who extremely hesitantly follows Des' example. When her living Corrupted blanket fails to do anything other than drape over her everything, her ragged breath slows down.

"I'm fiiine," she says, quietly but not whispering anymore.

Rolled Scroll pushes a Corrupted attempting to lick her bandages away:

"No, no, no, no, no..." she mumbles over and over, "I don't wanna turn."

"Lie down, miss mage," I say slowly, "Push them away if they try something, but lie down."

The more I think about it, the less I believe our visitors have any ill intent. They might not know what their presence is supposed to be doing, although I honestly don't feel any different, but they are trying to help... for some reason, likely the food Desert Shade gave them.

Whimpering, Scroll curls to a small ball and ends up weighted down by much larger Corrupted. Nothing moves in her pile for several seconds, but then a shaky voice squaks:

"I think... I think I'm okay."

The second oversized Corrupted, the mare this time, walks over to Lyam. She returns his stare and...

...tackles him down on the grass.

Her legs lock tightly around him, not budging despite his thrashing around, and she bites his shoulder, growling. Then she licks the fleshwound. For looking similar to ponies, these Corrupted have mouths full of razor sharp teeth. Lyam's grit beak lets out a hiss, but as he stops struggling, the mare locks him into a full-body submission move a wrestler would be proud of, and stops moving.

"Hard to... breathe," Lyam groans, "but I think... she likes me. Really warm..."

"Good," I hear Des hiss, "Now be a stallion and get molested quietly."

"Always... a ray of sunshine, Des," the griffon, much to his sleeping companion's surpise, manages to push her a tiny bit away. Then he just shifts slightly and stops resisting. The mare tightens her grasp again, but not as much.

"Mmmpghp!" the captured unicorn cult leader or whatever the noble responsible for reviving me is mumbles loudly into his cloth gag.

"You shut up, idiot!" Des growls angrily, "I swear that if you kill us by being even dumber than I think you are... I'm haunting your ghost's ass."

He whines, but with his mouth gagged and all four legs tied up he can barely move. As he gets his own pile of Corrupted, I hear quiet sobbing, but nothing indicating he's trying to fight back.

Being warmed up for the night by a mare embodiment of mating instinct, having made friends with ponies who tried to kill me a moment ago, discovered that I might still have a future with Crom, and in no immediate danger.

"Nighty night, and don't let Corrupted bite," I chuckle.

"I hate you," I hear a mumble from Scroll's pile.

"Agreed!" comes from the other involuntary 'bedmates'.

"MMHHMPH!" Des' prisoner joins in the annoyed chorus.

The fact that I seem to have lost nearly all my alicorn power is just a minor nuisance.

All in all...

...not bad for the first day, not bad.

Comments

[Two_Madmans]

Her legs lock tightly around him, not budging despite his thrashing around, and she bites his shoulder, growling. Then she licks the fleshwound. For looking similar to ponies, these Corrupted have mouths full of razor sharp teeth.

Reminds me the scene with Bubbles in shower.

[Anonymous Critic]

...not bad for the first day, not bad.

Okay... so how long until the diarrhea hits the open blender?

[Rubber2Duck]

"Good," I hear Des hiss, "Now be a stallion and get molested quietly."