Chapter 20: Foreleg
“Now, first, you must lift your foreleg up to your forehead, like so.”
“Sing!”
Have you ever sat there and watched a cat sing its catsong in the middle of the night? You know, the kind that attracts vultures and undesirable ethnic minorities alike to try to dine upon it? Well, the mare dancing upon the bar counter, her hips vacillating mesmerizingly as she sang and commanded ponies to sing in her off-tune yet endearing voice, reminded me of that as I stepped through the batwing-like bar doors.
I had come in here after being chased around the town by an escaped seeing-eye dog named “Kimbles”, according to his collar. He had been happily assaulting a mare pushing a stroller with her foal in it, but upon seeing me, my black poncho, my steel helmet, and my black leather boots, Kimbles decided to harass me. While Kimbles didn’t bite ponies, his idea of playing with them was decidedly violent, hence the word “assault”.
“Bad dog,” I hissed as Kimbles the golden retriever stared at me from outside the batwing doors. Thankfully for me, Kimbles had an irrational phobia of two things: squirrels covered in honey, and the great indoors.
My steel helmet felt right. It covered the upper part of my face and part of my nose, leaving most of my face bare, like those of my Wikinger ancestors. Though it didn’t have any horns attached; the Wikinger never actually had horned helmets. Common misconceptions.
Adjusting my poncho, I let my sword show, and went into the tavern proper. It was always taverns with me, wasn’t it? But that was where all the quest-giving characters were. Evidently, the sight of me turned a lot of heads. Mayhap they simply never got enough travelers. Or perhaps ponies dressed partly as ancient pagan raiders never frequented these parts. A shame. I was a great cosplayer. The dancing earther mare didn’t notice me as she led the bar in song and dance.
“Whoooa, and if you fight hard for foal and wife,
Try to get something good in this life,
You’re a sinner and bad buck,
And ya gon’ be by the Fiddler dead struck!”
She hopped off the bar as I sat down at it, the piano player in the room’s corner keeping his stride. As I fiddled with my poncho and sword, a mare in a plague mask sat down next to me. She put a card on the countertop and slid it over to me. The Fool. A preemptive move if ever I saw. It reminded me of that one nation-based board game I’d played once where I’d provoked my friend into declaring war on me, a war I would have won, by sending several pretty mares out to our heavy contest border. These mares were told to loudly proclaim how they’d all seen my friend naked and hadn’t stopped laughing since.
Sadly for me, though I recognized the trap, I couldn’t help but lash out at those laughing mares. I spoke. “And so what is this supposed to mean?”
The Blue-Eyed Mare leaned towards me, lifting part of her mask as she whispered, “Give not up.”
“Lady, just who are—” I gasped, a surge of cold water running over me. Reality broke away from me, replaced by confusion, vertigo, disorientation, and the urge to start a dairy farm that serviced weasels only. I had no idea if weasel milk was any good, but dammit, I wanted to be he who tried.
“Is he awake?” a mare asked.
I coughed and sputtered, cold water soaking me. Ponies crowded above me, Felicitat was one of them, Biche was another. “Verpisst euch,” I growled, rolling over and forcing myself to my feet. My head jerked in the direction of the Blue-Eyed Mare, where she had been before the fever overtook me. There was nopony there.
Looking back over to where the ponies really existed, I blinked. Standing by the front door was a mare in a familiar mask, her black jacket belted at the waist. While I knew that flanking maneuvers weren’t dirty tricks, unlike some mares I could name, this seemed like cheating. No being everyone at once! That was just a rule.
A sudden, irrational desire reamed my skull sideways. It was a lust, a lust I felt as I stared at the masked mare: the irrepressible, untamable, overbearing urge to just touch the Blue-Eyed Mare. Not in a sexual way, no. It was like that feeling you got when you looked over the edge of really tall cliff: the urge to just jump, to see what happens, to fall a great height and die.
“Hey, you,” I said weakly, holding out a hoof. “Who are you?”
With all the casualness of a pussycat in a cathouse, she strolled through the doors and into the midday outside. “N-no, please! Don’t-don’t… I just want to talk, I swear upon the face of my father!”
Ignoring the protests of Felicitat and Biche, I broke out into a sprint and slammed the door open. Out in the street, my instincts told me to run to the left, to the north. So I galloped northwards, the Blue-Eyed Lady nowhere to be seen. I thought I heard Felicitat and Biche calling after me, but I didn’t know for sure. I kept kept galloping and sprinting and running and dashing and barreling.
Town turned into river valley. Stone into grass and dirt. Grass into weeds and weeds into trees. I could feel bile-like blood circulating through my body. Each pump brought about a wailing agony in my skull, for the brain itself literally could not feel pain. I think I vomited somewhere along the way; I couldn’t say. All I could say was that I had to go north, towards the Blue-Eyed Mare.
My duster practically flapped as I vaulted boulders, little hills, bits of streams, and at least one very startled doe. A quick thought reminded me that biche meant doe, but that was all I afforded the ponies behind me. And as I ran, I began to see more and more of the Blue-Eyed Lady. She was behind every tree, every rock, every incline, every hill, always vanishing just before I got there. She reminded me of my first girlfriend in that way, teasing whenever it fit her.
I recalled her amber eyes, her sharp features. In the memory she was dressing herself after our first time. Her look was two-parts vague amusement, one-part almost real sympathy as she said, “Wow. You really get girly after doing it, huh?”
Biting my tongue, I forced the memories away. The Reich, the Fatherland, was behind me. She was probably dead, just like everyone else I’d ever had any care about in the Reich, which was why Dad was alive and well, I knew. For all I could truly care about, the Blue-Eyed Lady was my whole world… and I was okay with that…
Acids festered within my leg, perfectly normal but perfectly painful. I gulped in fresh air, my throat drying so hard that I choked on it. Each step was agony. I must have banged my hoof somewhere, because my ruined hoof was now leaving little specks of blood as I sprinted. Faint… what was I… where as I… why… blue eyes… Find her!
And my arms and legs gave out under me. I collapsed, rolling and rolling until I smashed my head on a rock so hard that it drew blood… blood… blood…
I saw her face, a filly’s face full of terror and fear as she looked directly up at me. The corpse of her mother had a bloody mouth, a steak knife impaled through her eye. I peeked in through the hole in the stone wall, the ruins of Esztergom behind me. “Hey there, kleines Mädchen. Are you okay?”
She whimpered, stepping back from me.
“It’s okay,” I said with a smile, not that she could see it through my Atemschutzmaske. The mask only let her see my eyes, if lucky. I reached out for her. “You look hungry. Would you like something to…” The lips died on my tongue as I saw why she was crying. She wasn’t scared of me or because of the dead mother and father by her side, no. That would be too easy. She was crying in silent agony from the bite wound that shredded her blouse. Equine teeth. Dead mother…
She was infected. There was nothing more to it. It was only a matter of time before the necromantic fungus got into her too deep and she turned into one of them. The Code looked down upon me, and it refused to comment as I raised my sword and… and so much blood… and the first time I contemplated suicide, even if my brothers-in-arm solemnly commended me on having the guts to do what none of them could do.
If I could laugh in the face of horror, I could keep away the monsters from my lack of dreams. So long as I didn’t dream, I could sleep soundly. So many bad things, so many smiles from me.
“You can’t give in,” she said, snapping me cold out of my stupor. She was sitting in there in front of me. Slowly, I rose a hoof to touch her, but she stood up and took herself from me.
“Please,” I begged in a weak tone.
“Give not up,” she insisted. “Only a little further now, Fool.”
“I feel as though our relationship has become verbally abusive,” I commented, and she slowly walked off into the brush and vanished. Nothing within me could work up the strength to go after her. I let the sun high above burn my eye and dry my blood into a crust that would not have gone very well on a pie. Trust me, I’ve tried. It never goes like you’d think it would.
A sudden fit of laughter overtook me as I remembered the last time I’d seen my father. I laughed like it was the funniest thing ever, so funny that I coughed until my throat felt about ready to bleed. One of his eyes, the one mirroring the one I lost, had something new: a battle wound. Where once the pupil had existed now only a sea of color surrounded by the image of an Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. When last I saw him, he’d been holding out his Iron Cross out to me, the one I still wore today.
Gritting my teeth, I grasped the Iron Cross. What was I anymore? What was I doing? Gone was Jericho Amadeus Faust, replaced by some diseased brat whose every other word, every other thought, was some genital thought. I… why?
Get your ass up, maggot! my father’s voice screamed in my ear. Move like you have a purpose!
Purpose. Hmm… Now, there’s a foreign word. As distant from my life as my mental image of Princess Celestia was from being anywhere near intimidating. Cardsie-wardsie-hatie-watie!
I took a deep breath in through my nose. With nothing but willpower, I rolled onto my stomach and stayed there until I lost track of the time. I could feel Father’s hoof in my mouth mixed with blood. Worthless boy. You have forgotten my face. So I gritted my teeth, swallowed the bile in my throat, ignored the headache, and stood up.
Before me stood trees by the banks of the river that had spent eons carving this little valley. I ambled forwards into the brush wherein the Blue-Eyed Mare had vanished. I could not run, only slowly drag myself through brush and bramble.
The drag led me to a little clearing choked with dry bits of bramble and leaves and dead wood. As I stumbled out into the clearing proper, still a distance from its center, I looked down at my right arm. The veins were black. Black as the darkest night with a dash of peppermint. Red meant infected. Black meant necrotic. The limb had been dragging not because I lacked will, but because it was dead. Not metaphorically. Literally dead.
So I thought long and hard, and eventually I dragged myself over to the center of the clearing. All of my efforts were focused on gathering up all the dry leaves and everything here, putting it into a huge pile at the center, and setting it alight via the magic of friction. I kept growing the flame until it was a bonfire, until the heat of the fire made me wince, my very bones filling with warmth. My good forehoof found its way to my empty eye. What had I done when it had died?
What I had done was… solve the problem. So I reached over, grabbed my sword in my teeth, stuck my arm into the fire, and went to work amputating the dead limb. Hack, slash, slash, slop, hack, saw, cauterize. Cauterize. Cauterize!
The rotten, diseased flesh came off easy enough; death made limbs so weak, flesh so maimable. I laughed like a banshee as the severed portion of the limb fell off. The nerves turned to a charred crisp, the veins, capillaries, and artery burned into a sickly-sweet smelling substance that made my tummy rumble, my mouth salivate.
When I pulled it out, half of my face felt burned in the first degree. Part of my flesh had melted over my arm, like a freaked scab that reminded me of the way a clown glares at a little filly. Still smiling, still laughing, I collapsed onto the ground. So much blood gone, but so many clear thoughts!
I don’t know how long I lay there, cackling like a hen who’s just eaten the fox. It was long enough for rain to come and for night to fall. At first I was soaked, but the bonfires dried me so well as it cast its dancing shadows all over the clearing like pagan witches who’ve just discovered what sugar was, but didn’t yet know with what orifice you consumed sugar. Only, not all of them were shadows. Figures stared at me from the edge of the clearing, their eyes flickering in the pyrelight. None of them dared approached me, even as my voicebox went raw and I could no longer even moan.
“You live,” a sweet voice said, and I suddenly found myself myself staring into beautiful blue eyes. Problem was, I was no longer dying beside a bonfire. Above me was the ancient vaulted ceiling of a castle or cathedral. I reached out a hoof to caress the face that held the eyes, but she pulled out. “Thank all the holies for that.”
“Where…?” I croaked. Literally croaked. My sudden desire to be a frog came out like a croak. “Ribbit,” I added. A part of me now wanted to find and severely annoy a witch. When I asked myself why, I drew a blank
“Don’t speak,” she said in a soft, motherly voice. Now that I looked, she was again wearing that masque from my earlier hallucination. Catching my look, she feigned a smile. “You know, not many a girl would forgive a guy for blowing her brains out through her skulls, that’s for sure. Lucky for us—” There’s an ‘us’? “—I’m a forgiving, understanding lady.” She winked at me. My internal organs couldn’t decide if I liked that look or if that look made me want to strangle her by her ovaries while carving the alphabet into her back with a spoon. ABC—Die, bitch! “Wait, no, I think I said that already…”
The mare shook her head. “You’ve come so far, Fool, so far,” she whispered, moving her lips closer and closer to my ear. “There’s just one thing left to do.” I could feel the heat of her body against my ear now. But words never came.
The night sky flashed before me once more. A tall figure was standing above me. There wasn’t much I could tell about the figure save that it was impossibly tall and its smile was three times too big for its face.
And then I was back in that cathedral-like room. She wasn’t standing over me, I realized with a wave of panic. I flailed until I was on my stomach, and I grunted as I lifted myself up with only three limbs to support myself. For some reason, I imagined myself with a pegleg ending with a hook. That mental image ended with me getting caught in a closet making out with a suit of armor, and me screaming, “This is who I am now—a machine with machine desires!”
I needed to get a hobby, I figured as I hobbled through the large room. It was like a throne room, years after the king was overthrown and the republic declared. In fact, there was an area that looked like it had once held a great throne. Tattered banners hang from the walls and ceiling, mayhap symbols of noble houses. Whatever this was, I stumbled wobbly through the place until I got to where I thought a throne might have been.
Then the faint but distinct scent of incense tackled my nose, screaming something about the square root of lemons. Behind the throne there was a little doorway once hidden by a bannister of crossed swords behind a snarling wolf. Walking the little passage led me into a larger corridor. I stopped to catch my breath. Apparently, losing your arm made you more prone to getting winded than a fat chick in an “ice cream and hot guys who will never love you” emporium.
Hah. Obesity. The lethargic killer. Still less scary than a brain aneurysm. Those things just haunted my nightmares. You never knew when they could happen, and they just instantly killed you. How ponies went around not in constant fear was beyond me.
Licking my parched lips with a tongue so dry that a cat would call it scratchy, I went back to walking, following the smell.
The hall vanished into a large semi-circular balcony for no adequately explored reason. Beyond the balcony was an ocean, its waters red in the setting sun. I could see that this was indeed a ruined castle. Tall spires connected by narrow bridged rose out of the bay beneath the castle, as if some giant had lazily been trying to build up a goal post, gave up halfway, then decided he was going to become a painter who painted only small rodents. He was probably dying of poverty.
But more importantly, there was a half-dressed mare sitting on the balcony, a half-circle of burning candles before her. She was half-dressed because her jacket was around her waist where it was belted, a plagued mask tossed to the side.
When she slowly turned her head to look at me, she sighed. Her face was striking; not because of radiant beauty or anything, but because it was the face of a mare whose childhood had visibly been slapped out of her face. I couldn’t tell her age, but I estimated her to be somewhere in her early-to-mid thirties. I liked her mane. A strange part of me wanted to shave her bald, stitch her mane into a wig, and then staple it to Cards’ forehead—just because it’d totally be cute.
You need help, Jericho. You need so much help.
“Long days and pleasant nights to you, Fool,” she said in a voice that was cool, but not hostile.
“I liked it better when I was the Hanged Stallion,” I replied. “Sounds less daft.”
She shrugged, still not facing me fully. “We cannot choose who we are.”
“I like to think it was my choice to do this and not become a ballerina like my father wanted me to be.”
“Did he really want you to…?”
I shook my head. “No; I just say things. Doesn’t change the fact at hand, though.”
She grunted. “You have interesting eyes… interesting eye, that is,” the half-nude mare commented, turning back to her candles. “You have the eye of a corpse. One who is far too alive and mayhap stupid to know that it has been dead for a very long time.”
“Are you hitting on me?” I asked, narrowing my eye. “Because if you are, appealing to my mutilations only makes you seem like one of those ponies with weird fetishes. You’re one of those mares who’s into cripples and tentacles, aren’t you?” I accused.
Her manner remained just as composed. “No.”
I deflated. It felt as if I needed to be blo—no, no, there was absolutely no way to phrase that without sounding like a sex joke. “So, you’re saying you judge for me the blood and flesh I lost defending the good and virtuous?!”
“No.”
“Oh, you are just an utter bitch,” I groused. “You can’t just be so calm when I say unusual things.”
“I try my best, Fool,” she said in a casual tone.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
The Blue-Eyed Mare turned to look at me, the distant sound of waves crashing ringing across the barren cliffs below the castle. “It is your card.”
I nodded, leaning to the side and up against the little doorway to the balcony. How I had ended up here was a bit foggy, but hopefully I wasn’t carried here by exactly four and a half dwarves or a sleigh team of gerbils. It happened to me once and I could never again look at sunsets the same way again afterwards. “Oh, I get it,” I said, nodding my head. “This whole thing isn’t real!”
Smiling at the mare only made her grimace. I went on. “So you’re not real! This castle is but a bad thought. You call me Fool because my fever dream dreamed up that card.” I pointed to my right arm… and promptly fell to the ground. “And I didn’t really cut my arm off!”
Her grimace deepened, and she scrunched her neck slightly in a way that reminded me of my first pet. My first pet had been a tortoise who, upon seeing me for the first time, became so scared that he hid in his shell until he starved to death. “No… that really did happen…”
I blinked, my smile going from ecstatic to the kind of fake smile you gave your grandparents so that they wouldn’t commit suicide because they were old and nopony loved them. “Well then.” I laughed twice. “My life is so going to suck from now on.” And the frown came. “Oh sweet God, I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“It’s not all that bad, considering,” she replied hesitantly. “I once knew a pony who had to amputate all four limbs, then perform open heart surgery on themselves.”
I laughed, but she didn’t. “Oh God, you’re serious. Huh. Here I was, thinking that you and I had the same sense of humor.” I frowned. “Why does nopony ever share in my sense of humor?”
“Have you ever—”
“Hey!” I exclaimed, pointing at her. “You don’t have a shadow.”
“What?”
I pointed at her, then at myself. “I have a shadow. You’re not casting a shadow. Stop it. That’s weird.” A seagull… or something—it had four slit-like eyes and talons but was otherwise identical to a seagull—landed on the stone walls of the little balcony and made a sound that was somewhere in-between a seagull’s cry and a very small filly screaming ‘mollify’. “See? This abomination has a shadow. Why don’t you?”
She stood up, her jacket remaining on the ground. Raising a brow, I noted dully that she wasn’t wearing pants proper, just vague undergarments. Something about that seemed like a bad idea to me. What kind of lunatic sits outside with candles, watching the sunset in her underpants? They were white in that way wherein they were practically see-through, too. Because my fever dreams hated me, I doubted that she’d just so happened to be wearing something so provocative.
Taking a sniff of the air, I noticed that the smell of the candles was gone as the wind picked up. “If this is the part of the dream where things get fun and I wake up feeling weird, I’d like to just wake up please.”
The Blue-Eyed Mare rolled her eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I do enjoy syrup on my waffles, yes,” I replied. “And yes, I will gladly make us breakfast—provided that you have the waffle mix and syrup, of course, because I’m just nice like that. We can sit at the table and talk about… uh… taxes, because that’s what normal ponies talk about.”
She looked longingly up at the castle and sighed. “I don’t pay taxes.”
I went to clap my forehooves together in excitement, but instead fell back into the floor. “See? We’ll have something to discuss. I don’t really know for exactly how long I’ve not been in my home, but depending on some estimates, I may owe up to ten years’ worth of a back taxes to the Reich. Aww! When I get home, some government ponies wearing black coats are gonna drag me onto the street and publicly break my knees and face with baseball bats! And it will be great.”
“Waltharius!” she blurted out, stamping a hoof.
“Ja?” I goaded.
“Everything you said about him was correct, right?”
“Well, I don’t like to lie about history. I like it. Lying about others things, though, no problem.”
The Blue-Eyed Mare bit the corner of her lip, looking down. “That is a name I recognize. When you first said it, I snapped somewhat.”
I blinked. “You mean, that sudden burst of rage I felt when I mentioned his name to Felicitat?”
She nodded, looking off to the weird mutant seagull. “Yes, that was me.” The mare paused to take a breath. I spun around a full revolution just to see what it was like without my right arm. “So. You defeated Waltharius?”
“In absolutely every way, the Good Stallion was outmatched by King Viktor,” I said. “Waltharius made a move against the Reich, they say, when his agents burned down our capital of Zentrum in order to try to keep us from interfering. There’s few crazy conspiracy theorists who insist Viktor burned down his own capital to provoke the war, though. Ponies who buy into that are daft. Anyways, within a few years, the flag of the falcon and Iron Cross flew victoriously over two continents other than our own.” I narrowed at eye. “But you’re a figment of my imagination, not my history teacher. What gives?”
“Because that’s not how it happened here,” she said.
“Here?”
She cast her eyes off to the castle. “On the other side of this castle there is… was a city… the greatest in this world.” If she expected me to question her further on this, I didn’t. While I was listening, I was trying to think up the next greatest dance craze that didn’t involve your right arm. “It was thriving, great, magnificent, rich, mighty, beautiful. And then the Good Stallion came. He was just like he was in your world, from raider to messiah, preaching the same message of equality and an end to class-based slavery. Though, he said nothing of magic like yours did.”
Tscha-tscha-tscha, supertango! “So, without the Reich to save you, your homeland was destroyed?”
She hesitated. “And now I am the last of those ponies. Then he went into your world, I suspect, and there was he slain.”
“Come again?”
The Blue-Eyed Mare sighed, turning around. She walked over to the edge of the balcony. She had nice flanks; they looked to me like ones exercised through a hard life, not vain exercising for its own sake. Were I a lesser stallion, I might have stared at it instead of wondering just how many jackrabbits I could hide in my now-armless sleeve. Imagine just what kind of shenanigans I could pull of with a sleeve full of jackrabbits!
With a sudden leap, she hopped up onto the balcony’s railing, looking right at me. She held out a hoof and smiled, like a mother offering to help pick up her foal who had fallen into a cage of rabbit jackalopes. “Are you coming?”
I had found once that sometimes unexpected things waltzed into my head if I let the door open for them. Useful things, often. Now, though, was different. Suddenly she had my rapt attention and interest.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Come here,” she offered in a siren-like tone.
Against the screaming in my head not to walk, I went up to her. She grabbed my left arm and helped me onto the balcony. It was at that moment that, with horror, I realized that going up stairs was going to suck. Great. So. In summation, I was a whacky cripple who most certainly would still gnaw your fetlocks off.
Eh, I’ve probably had worse.
No, no you have not.
“Why are we up here?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She meant to kill me, and I had just stopped caring. Of course, that was exactly what I thought whenever I was standing on a ledge and another pony was near me, but whatever.
“You are trapped in this dreamscape, this place between mind and reality. There is one way out.”
“Does it involve you pushing me to my death?” I glanced down. “It’s a long way down. And contrary to popular belief, water does not soften a fall; in fact, it often worsens it; it’s about as hard as concrete when you fall into it from a great distance.”
“Well, I only need you to do one thing,” she said softly.
“And what is that?”
She brought her lips to my ear and whispered one word: “Fly.”
But I didn’t know how to fly any more than a dog knew how to carry all of these limes, so all I could do was fall. I was not wrong about what she wanted to do. All I could think of as I fell was a dull I wonder if they serve continental breakfast in Hell.
I didn’t die when I hit the water. In fact, once again I was on my back, laying beside my bonfire. The rain was gone. It blinked out the daze of fever dream away, and my blood went cold.
There were two balls of fire—no, not fire. They were reflections of the bonfire upon the eyes of a tall creature. It was like the way a cat’s eyes light up when flashed with light whilst in a dark place, only worse. Its… his mouth was locked in a smile too large for his face.
“Jericho-tsaius,” he said in a dark voice. His body seemed almost ethereal as the firelight flickered across his body, the moon high above him in the sky.
“C,” I stated, my eye feeling heavy in my skull.
He crouched down, and the look of his smile sent pinpricks of worry oozing down my spine. His teeth looked whiter and stronger than mine; when he spoke, I could see his version of temporalis muscles flexing his jaws, and they looked strong. I noticed that he was no longer naked but instead wearing a pair of what looks like work jeans and, oddly, a black poncho.
“You are hurt,” C said in a flat voice, his face knitting its smile into a more reasonably sized one. He raised an arm, lifting his poncho with it as he touched my stumpy arm. “I can help you, Tsaius.”
“Why are you here?” I croaked.
The question seemed to make him have to think. His eyes darted off to the side in the way that a pony trying to remember something will do. I had no idea if his body language corresponded at all to that of a pony. “Because ye are in trouble, Tsaius. Because I have been tracking you for some time now. And because a little lady asked me to look out for you.”
I had to think about that for a second. “Lightning Dust?”
“Nay,” he said, shaking his head. “’Twas Cards.”
Her name hit me like a rampaging herd of elephants trying to learn how to wear stockings. “What?”
“Yes,” he went on, “Cards. When I saved them, I noted that I doubted you’d die. And so she said—” C cut himself off with a jerk, pulling out two strong, serrated knives. I went to telekinect my sword, but that didn’t work, just giving me a sharp stabbing pain in my forehead. With his knives, he stabbed himself deep in the cheeks, dragging the blade up through bone and muscle.
When the blades cleared, a shadowy, star-filled void leaked out of his face, followed by root-like extension of black char. They enveloped his face above and around the cuts. My skin crawled as his skin twisted and jerked, his eyes going with it.
It didn’t take long for the process to stop. When it did, I was no longer staring into C’s eyes but the saddened yet fiery red eyes of Cards. In fact, his upper head was now hers: her face with his lower jaw, his upper jaw. Then he spoke in her exact voice, his… her… the face moving in the exact subtle ways that Cards’ face did.
“H-he’s alive?” Cards’ voice said, like a perfectly clear recording.
A sharp but quiet click sounded. Then it was C’s strong, horrible voice from his twisted face. “Yes, I doubt not that he is a cadaver. He has the smell of ingenuity about him. His flesh is weak as is yours, yet I trust in his broken mind to persevere and succeed this day.”
Click. Her voice. “If that’s true, then… then…” Cards’ face scrunched up like a filly asking a colt to a dance. Only instead of a dance, it was spiders. Everything was spiders. It might have been cute if it hadn’t been literally the worst thing ever.
Click. His voice. “Then what?”
Click. Her voice. “Then…” She sighed, looking off to the side. “Make sure he doesn’t, like… get too hurt or anything, please. Like, look out for him, maybe. I just… I hate him but… I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Click. His voice. “Of course, milady. I swear upon the Skahlzhinh that I will look out for him, if only for a short while.”
One of C’s big, strong hands came up from behind the Cards-head, grabbed the top of the head, his fingers digging into the tops of her eyes. I was a first-class witness to Cards’ face being torn apart by C’s hands, blood and gore and all, her face an impartial blankness. Her eyes fell out of her sockets as C clawed off the rest of the face.
Then it was just C’s face watching me with an amused little smirk. “Those were her words, Tsaius.”
For the first time in as long as I could recall—which didn’t amount to very long at this moment—I was speechless. No witty remark, half-baked joke, or stupid thought. I just stared up at C.
“So, I’ve been watching you for a time, Tsaius,” he went on, “and now I think I can help you.” He shrugged. “For what it’s worth.”
“Why now?” I asked wearily. “Why not help me when I was dying in the swamp?”
C frowned, looked around, then looked pleased with himself. He pointed to a little sapling that was all on its own, too narrow and thin to be of use to my bonfire. “Do you see this cocoon?”
I squinted. “I… I think I do.”
The skinwalker pulled out a knife and pointed it at the sapling. “This here is a moth cocoon. From what I know of cocoons, the little way its moving and that tiny little hole in it means that the larva is matured into a fully grown moth.” He brought the tip the knife very close to the cocoon. “Now, I could help this little fellow get out: I could just take the tip of my knife and help widen the hole, help the little guy out.” C pointed the knife at me. “But if I did that, the moth would be too weak to live. You see, it’s that struggle, that fight for survive, whence strength comes from.
“Now, I could have helped you early, maybe even helped you keep your eye and horn.” He gave a single mirthless chortle. The word ‘chortle’ always made me think of an enormously fat pony trying to eat a hippopotamus. “But if I did that, you’d be too weak, Tsaius. I let you suffer because it made you better, made you stronger, made you able to survive worse.”
“A-and now?”
He sheathed the knife and stood up tall. “Now, if I don’t help you, you’ll be too weak to continue. Take the word of the last in the skinwalker’s line that there are those who would rather you alive.”
Without warning, the skinwalker fell forwards onto all fours, holding himself up above me. He opened his mouth as wide as a snake eating a mopey mare bloated with ice cream because nopony loved her. Exactly eight black, spider-like legs curled out from the back of his throat. I could only stare with morbid, horrified fascination as the legs set themselves down around the edges of his face.
I watched as each leg tapped once on his face. “Hmm,” he hummed, and the legs curled back into his mouth and down his throat. “I will help you, Tsaius.”
The skinwalker’s flaming eyes darted to my stump of an arm as his hand grabbed for it. He positioned himself over my arm, a foot pinning my shoulder. “But first… this stump needs to go.”
My world erupted into unimaginable pain as his thick, clawed fingers slashed and savaged the scabs and burns off the edge of the stump. I screamed, or tried to scream, but my sore throat only hacked out a bloody cough in place of agonized shriek,
And he manually tore and clawed off what little of my arm there was.
Everything went black. The last thing I saw, the thing burned into my retinas, was his smile literally tearing his face in half.
So wait.... Is cards dead? Or was that more skin walker weirdness
Just in case you didn't know the story is awesome, I love it
3267678 Think he might have just recreated Card's face because um, I guess that's what demons/angels/...eldritch abominations do I guess. Either that or to be theatrical. And then just tore it off because that might be uncomfortable, I think, C's just a really strange creature.
I really really hope Cards isn't dead. There was still so much that could be done with that relationship. And if she is dead, then why did C save her in the first place? That wouldn't make any sense, even for this story.
Damn......
Jerichos balls must have dropped so far to be able to cut his own leg off,,,,
...damn. You know, I totally saw a bunch of that coming; but that skinwalker is still FREAKY AS HELL.
So, is this bit coming up now why his right arm was darker in the cards? I REALLY hope it's not because it gets replaced with skinwalker!spider-legs.
*reads chapter title*
Haha, "Foreleg." I bet he'll lose his foreleg in this one.
...
Crap, this is Crushric I'm talking about. He totally will.
*reads chapter anyway*
Sigh... this is almost getting predictable... But then you had to throw in your jokes in the middle and get me laughing anyway... confound it all. I don't even know anymore. Then again, me not knowing is pretty predictable, too. So all I'll say is bravo.
Gotta say, as freaky and disturbing as C is... he's pretty brilliant, maybe it's because I picture him with a thick english accent... I dunno man.
Anyway, great chapter as always. Pretty surreal with the mindfuckery.
First Jericho looses his horn, then his eye, now his right foreleg. There's not going to be much left of him by the end of the story at this rate.
That's a reference to LOST isn't it!
I like chapters that are shorter like this one. It's easier to read. Keep up the good work.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEES.
HE KILLED CARDS?!
i.imgur.com/DFTkO4K.jpg
Dragonburn98 with the element of awesomeness!
SIG with the element of mediocrity!
BY OUR POWERS COMBINED, WE ARE CAPTAIN COMMENTARD!
Saving the chapters from low post counts one rambling digression at a time!
Heh.
I am the minority in my neighbourhood...
While I have never broken out the crock-pot for a cat, Significant Other and I have had to chase off several stray caterwauling moggies who were in flagrante delicto outside our bedroom window. Significant Other bought a low powered Airsoft pistol for this purpose. "Love and Tolerance" only goes so far when said cats start corroding your bicycle with their caustic kitty urine
(Mind you the pistol is weak enough to only leave a stinging welt, as I discovered when Significant Other "volunteered" me to test out the plastic pellets on my rear end...)
That has to be well nigh impossible to describe that line of work in conversation or on your CV without being laughed out of the room or charged with some sexual crime.
Sooo many innuendos...
"So what do you do for a living?"
"I milk my weasel into a bucket, bottle it up, and sell it."
I know the feeling.
First demons, then eldritch abominations, then chemical weapons, then zombies, now an equine version of cordyceps? Is there anything left of Teutchland by this point or has it been slagged down to a smoking, vitrified crater?
Giggle at the ghostly...
I really like how we can finally see the real Jericho out from underneath his socioipathic mask.
lady fingers! they taste just like lady fingers!
I imagine Jericho would be proper chuffed if he got his hooves on the tattooing execution device from Franz Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony.
Look on the bright side! You can now be the most kick-ass Candyman cosplayer ever!
Nah. A single artificial leg is not too bad. When your gynaecologist/proctologist has to call in a mechanic with a socket wrench set before your physical is when you have a problem. (Alternatively you know you have a problem when your doctor recommends you get a MOT test in lieu of a physical)
The good news is that is was not four and a half dwarf ponies nor gerbils.
The bad news is that it is actually eight dwarf ponies and a sleigh team of ovipositor beavers. And they brought their pet bogtopi. And Cherrypillar is leading the whole pack.
Ohhh... Kinky!
Talk dirty to me! Whisper sweet nothings in my ear about amortization by defenestrated capital!
Zentrum was an inside job! It was covered up by the useful fools who worked alongside the cutouts, who were ran by the agents, who were part of the cells, organised by the underground army, which was funded and armed by the unethical multinational corporation, which was bankrolled by the opposition politicos, ruled by the cabinet, influenced by the Cabal, controlled by the Mystic Inner Circle, and masterminded by the Waffles. It is all so simple and obvious!
We wonders, aye we wonders...
I can think of several things. Unfortunately all but four of then should probably be dismissed because, (A) Jericho is not a transgendered eunuch, (B) the weathervane will cause unsightly staining and tender soreness, and (C) that much oatmeal is impractical to come by (and I am not that crazy).
Tis but a scratch!
This dredged up early memories of that Newsboys song, Breakfast, that one of my older brothers used to listen to...
They may not have breakfast explicitly prepared and served for you in hell, but it stands to reason that there will be plenty of tasty demons to go around. Dammit Jericho! When are you going to finally share that recipe for demon gougère you promised us?
Whoah.
That is a crazy, freaky ability. It would be fun to have that power (provided the required mutilations did not hurt). If nothing else, it would make video conference calls at $WORK a lot more exciting...
Jericho Faust, Teutcher Konfessor.
A stallion barely alive.
We can rebuild him.
We have the magic.
We have a skinwalker to create Equestria's first chimeric stallion.
Jericho Amadeus Faust will be that stallion.
Better than he was before.
Better.
Stronger.
More snarky...
Yes, more Jericho! You made my night, good sir!
Jeez, what's with Jericho and self mutilation? Will he end up amputating his other limbs, then performing open heart surgery on himself like that other guy? Because I don't doubt that you could make it hilarious.
I'm still not sure what's up with the "Mysterious" mare, but I'm sure you'll resolve that plotline eventually. ...Right?
3267678>>3267781>>3267822>>3269068
Nay, good sirs, Cards is not, in fact, dead. This instance was C reforming his upper face and voice in the likeness of the petite mare we all know and love. Were I to make an analysis of his reasons for doing this based on what I know of C's character, I'd say that he did this to show off, because he likes the attention. The whole Cards' face being ripped in two was C ripping off the outer layer of flesh formed around his head, and not, in fact, actually Cards being killed. In this case, he did it to freak Jericho the fuck out. He likes the reactions.
3268418
Fun fact, C only sounds like that because he stole the Devil's Backbone's tongue and ate it. How he would sound if he was given the capability to speak according to the cultural speech pattern he uses in his native language, we may never know.
But I'm pretty sure It'd be something along the lines Jericho, actually, but with disturbing amounts of swearing and creepy threats.
3270033
*Slowly put down M24 sniper rifle*
...I guess that makes sense...
I imagine that somewhere in Equestria is a stallion called Funny van Dannen, who'll sing this song, just as Jericho passes by:
Viktor schaut auf Zentrum und sagt Ich zünd die ganze Scheiße an
Sein Chef-Massacreur sagt, König, tu was du nicht lassen kannst
Der einäugige Tierarzt bringt den Lieblingsozelot rein
Er brummt: Wenn er so steif bleibt, muss es was Ernstes sein
Und Viktor brüllt und lässt sich Juggernog bringen
Und der gemischte Solarichor muss sein Lieblingslied schon wieder singen
Billige Räusche, hartes Verlangen, so viele Jahre sind vergangen
Und das ist gut so, mach kein Geschrei, denn nur so geht alles vorbei
... I doubt he'll manage to sing the other verses.
Bonus challenge! Who are the "Chef-Massacreur" and the "einäugige Tierarzt"?
3272181
FoE Heroes reference, for the win.
Also, your castration my quintapi draws nearer, author... Fix his horn.
All I have to say is YES GODDAMN THIS IS AWESOME!
If he get's a steampunky mech leg, I will be very happy. If not, I will still be happy. Whoo! :D
3268285
So long as C is a super unsettling badass abomination, I'm happy.
And aye, the events of this chapter were why his arm was the wrong color in the cards.
To quote one of my favorite poets about it:
Bonus points if you know what I'm quoting.
3268362
Well, I wasn't going to have it be a secret: I knew what you'd think when I named the chapter as I did; I'm nothing if not frank. At least I got a "yay", so I think that's a favorable rating.
3268418
If it's British, let it be a low-class British Thug accent.
3268749
MUTILATE ALL THE PONY!
And yes, an allusion to John Locke.
3269101
And with your idea and my nothing, we could be rich!
Sometimes things slip through the cracks.
Well, there goes Jericho's day.
it was just the sort of creepy thing that popped into my mind. The skinwalker is a fun guy, ain't he?
To quote C (quoting T.S. Eliot) from a later on in the story:
So. Is Jericho all better and less crazy/penis-y as he was before?
3269628
:Clears Throat:
I dunno.
3271441
Die Musik! Ye music, be ye of lies or speak ye true?
3272181 3273432
FoE Heroes? I don't exactly follow how they relate here. Also: why is it that Jericho keeps getting compared to FoE Heroes and FoE: Project Horizons?
Confusing? Well, yes, this chapter was a bit weird.
Eh, we'll see where Act 2 takes us.
3274799
Something's gonna happen to his leg, aye, so it will. Just you wait. Probably gonna be another short update next week due to time constraints of my part.
3274974 Totally.
Then Jericho wakes up back in the 'care' of Duke Elkington. There was no Skinwalker. There is no Devils Backbone. It was all a highly elaborate hallucination caused by the pain of falling off a freaking castle wall. He only imagined slaughtering all those innoncents at Sleepy Oaks because he felt subconsciously guilty at slaughtering all those (probably) innocent guards. He has only been kept alive because Elkington wants to kill Jericho himself. Which he does. And he then proceeds to violate Jerichos corpse. Because honestly, we haven't had enough sexual fetish jokes yet.
The end.
3274974
Madame Felicitat, famous prophetess,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest mare in Caval,
<...>
If you see dear Blue-Eyed mare,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
More and more, this fic is becoming like a bad acid trip. I kinda like it.
3269101 I think I love you, but in all honesty I'd be the element of mediocrity. You say things that actually make sense and they make me giggle like a school girl.
I bring another one of these things today, one that should grip audiences, make women wet themselves sexually and non sexually, and give me the satisfaction of writing random shit in a white box. Now with 5% more commentary by me. Bringing the quote to comment ratio up to 90:10.
1.......2......3......PENIS
This isn't glee, people don't randomly bust out into song. "I came in like a wrecking ball, I never hit so hard in love, All I wanted was to break your walls, All you ever did was wreck me, Yeah, you, you wreck me!".
Cats don't sing, they cry until you give them food. Then, because they're all assholes, they bite you and run away without letting you touch their nice soft fur.
Holy sombrero Batman! We better get these batbardoors back to the batcave so we can drink some batalcohol and have some batgayconsensualbuttsex.
It's ok Kimbles, we have the same fears. It never gets better trust me.
Those damn Equestrians with their backwater knowledge. They probably don't even know what a pagan is.
The definition of a great cosplayer is "someone who can look natural in both female and male costumes". Good luck pal, you should go as Cardsy sometime. Remember the socks, they're the most important feature.
I like to think that the Equestrians are at least semi-modernized. If that's true whats with the fascination of death!? The Fiddler is death to them, but why do they sing? Why do they praise? Why do they cry? Death doesn't happen very often in Equestria (as far as we know), so why is it a big deal!
No bad touch! Touching people without their specified permission is bad! Bad Jericho bad!
Cats cannot be casual, especially in a whorehouse! Oh, look at all the douchbags I can harass with my +444444 annoyance factor.
Shouldn't it be actually flapping? He is moving fast and jumping.
Jericho can hold a girlfriend! News to me.
Never mind........
I really hope Jericho's past in the Reich, or maybe even the Reich itself is explored upon in the future. It'd be fantastical.
I swear I've seen this somewhere before......
I'll show you verbally abusive....... pee pee pants.
That came out of nowhere, also it's not Cardsie it's Cardsy. Ys aren't used often enough
I get that it's an expression, but I don't think Jerry Bear could ever forget your face baby-anus-licker.
Friction is magic, where would we be without knowing the concept of friction! Probably right where we are right now.
Fucking cyborg zombie alicorn princess! Calling it.
We always have to be reminded each chapter that Jericho is bat shit crazy.
I too suddenly have the urge to become a mooooooo. On an absolutely related note, why has a gangsta cow movie not be made yet? It would be pretty kick-ass "Mooo Moo Muthafucka" or "Open wide bitch my udders be tinglin."
Do not make eye contact with the specimen he may take it as a prelude to anal rape.
Called it.
Q/M = 2V/r^2 B^2 That should work.
I was honestly thinking about that last night. Written correctly "The Aneurysm" would make a great short horror story.
Probably by daddy's penis.
Yes, Luna's hair on Cardsy's forehead. Not even on her scalp like normal hair, just stapled to her forehead. Forced to live a life of shame, a live of hanging uselessly in front of a poor mares cutesy wootsy face.
Cripple tentacle rape? I'd Google that for confirmation, but I want to sleep peacefully tonight.
Calm=Bitch. If you don't freak out over my creepy lines you're definitely a bitch.
That is one hardcore motherfucker. He probably was an earth pony too.
What kind of lunatic watches the sun set? Some study somewhere proves that staring at the sun causes brain cancer.
Most certainly, they have to keep the monsters happy.
You think a magical monster from a different dimension would have a less messy hologram system.
Chortle just sounds like a fat word. The same applies to america.
I don't see how letting Jericho loose his leg makes him stronger or better. If anything it made him a lot weaker.
I don't really have anything to say about this chapter, other than interesting. Si's obviously going to heal Jericho back to tip top shape, or rape him and make Cards watch. Probably that second one. Hopefully Jericho's midlife separation continues. The mental image of quadriplegic Jericho hopping around on his penis mashing his teeth together at demons is to great to leave out.
God damn, this story is making those around me think I'm crazy because I keep reading bits out loud, and in over the top voices... to bad for them I give no fucks when a story is this mind-imploding.
retinas does that mean plural so he has both hes eyes now or was that a spelling error
3269101>>3277608
I love you guys. Overwhelming amounts of homo/hetero. Seriously, though,
Care to explain this one?
3275421 There's only one issue with that, and that's the fact that it'd mean Jericho hadn't lost all those body parts. And that's a no-no.
3285249 But good sir, You are crazy.
3286034 Nope, there's no way he'd get another functioning eye just like that.
3286148
I'd love to! Uhhh well… I could probably explain that equation if I knew the context (quickly googling "complicated equation" doesn't help). Alas, the original problem "What is the square root of a Lemon?" is unsolvable. You see, a lemon doesn't have a square root. It is after all, a simple lemon. Lemons don't have square roots because they're not numbers. I'm not trying to be racist, but it's the unfortunate truth. Lemons, like us humans and the occasional talking multi-colored equine. Have not been granted the pleasure of becoming a number. We're only allowed to marvel and watch as they work their dirty magic. And then jack off all over the paper. Which is normally not fun to watch.
3288682
From the author of 50 Derivations of Phi come the following saucy stories:
- The Perfumed Garden of Linear Algebra
- Bound and Derived: Sensuously Steamy Set Studies
- Ergodic Confessions of Riemannian Manifolds
- The Joys of Tantric Differential Analysis
You would not believe some of the depraved, perverted things those numbers do!
Modulus!
Base-swapping!
Factoring complex polynomials over infinite fields!
Logarithms!
3286148 Well obviously Elkington cut them off while Jericho slept.
He needed a snack. His tummy was making the rumblings, that only pony flesh can satisfy......
I imagine this is as close as we can get to what My Little Pony would be like if Quentin Tarentino wrote the show.
3292027
Because Welshponies are best ponies. And because I always figured that there were Scottish, Irish, and Welsh ponies up in the norther parts of Equestria. And because, let's me honest, Welsh is a cool language. More fics need Welsh Lightning Dust. It's my new headcanon, anyhow, because awesome pony.
3285121
Well, that's all you'll need! The German used here isn't that kind that's too hard, or else when used, it's translated or only used in order to sound German and thus scary.
3285249
So, you're essentially doing your own persona version of an audio book version of Jericho? How do each of the characters sound when you do them, I ask.
3277608
God, I am so slow in replying to comments. But, as usual, you've provided the Jericho Team with a fun night of reading. Trust me, we live for the comments we receive. My thing is, so long if Jericho sticks with people and folks remember it for a while, I've written a good tale.
People actually care about Jericho's past and the Reich and want to know more? People actually care about the history of an OC. Times to blow the horn of ages and signal Götterdämmerung!
But no, really, you'd actually want to see that, his past and all that?
3275711
Yes, yes, and yes. T.S. Eliot—now with ponies!
3275692
That's can't possibly be Cards! She looks too confident and happy.
3296707 Lets see... Jericho is a bit high pitched, certainty not feminine, maybe a bit scratchy, speaks really fast kinda like a mad scientist. The TF2 Medic would be a decent comparison, but not quite.
C, I see (ha) speaking rather calm but with a ever present caring/concerned/knowing tone, like a parent. he sounds high class and almost musical and his voice echos. (not that I can do that if I tried, but in my head)
All the bartenders are Scottish, no exceptions.
Proud, I picture with a knights voice (Duncan from Dragon Age, just not as old or badass, would be a fine example. in fact if you are familiar with the game, proud would be Dunan's and Alistar's love baby)
Cards, sounds like Hit-Girl from Kickass to me, just not nearly as intimidating, and you know... more Cardsy.
Dust is Dust.
I don't really know what to do with Felicitat or Biche, so they have a 18th century lower and upper-class voice respectively. Also every time I read Felicitat, it looks like filly cat.
Somehow, Jericho's thoughts when enhanced with diseased hallucination might actually be more coherent than normal.