This is so I don't feel guilty about the last hiatus. · 3:35am Apr 2nd, 2016
There was silence in the Everfree Forest. A tall unicorn, his coat the dull grey of unpolished steel with eyes to match, paced slowly before a necromancer that busied itself cowering. “You mean to tell me three husks and your brother all failed?” the grey pony asked, his voice low and silky smooth. “They could not kill one fledging, barely blooded and hardly trained, and five mortals?”
“She fought like a madmare,” the necromancer protested. “She nearly killed herself destroying the last of the husks, with a smile on her face. How am I to fight that?”
The grey pony snorted impatiently. “By dying, if need be. I'd thought I'd taught you to fear failing me more than your own end?”
The necromancer shuddered despite the warm night air. “I thought it better to return to you and inform you of why the mortals survived. The fledgling was not the one who saved them.”
The grey pony quirked a curious eyebrow. “Oh? Is there another?”
“The Blind One,” the necromancer whispered. “As my brother left the forest, The Blind One appeared and tore the soul from him.”
The grey pony stopped pacing and stood still as death. “You made the right choice,” he said after a moment of silence. “This information is more valuable than any other service you could ever provide. You have earned my thanks, and a gift.”
The necromancer looked up, hideous anticipation in his eyes. The grey pony smiled, and with a single blurred motion drove his hoof through the necromancers skull. “Peace is the greatest gift I can provide,” the grey pony chuckled as he cleaned blood and viscera from himself with a flurry of magic.
“A waste,” a huge, resonant voice commented from the shadow of a tree. “Why kill him when he had done well?”
“It was a reward,” the grey pony answered, his tone utterly sincere. “All of us wait for death. Or have you come to enjoy eternity?”
There was a snort that sounded more like rocks being crushed as a titanic earth pony stepped forward to examine the necromancers remains, his massive frame easily dwarfing even the tall grey unicorn he stood near. “I can't remember her name,” he said, his voice a barely audible subterranian rumble. “My wife. I killed her before I learned to control myself. I think of her every day, and yet her name is lost to me. As is her face. I can't even recall if she was an earth pony or one of the other tribes. The day I die will be my happiest day in this world, and if I am for The Pit, then I will tear down that hell reach her. I merely think his death could have been more profitably used.”
“The reward for work well done is more work?” the grey pony replied. “Rather defeats the point.”
Riese shrugged the mountains that passed for his shoulders. “That may be so,” he admitted, then he fell silent for a while. “The Blind One,” he muttered as he shook his head. “Even Death stands against us now?”
The grey pony smiled, a feral expression. “If he does, then I suppose it would be the right time.”
Riese's eyes widened in shock. “After six thousand years you would take that beast's bargain?”
“Oh yes, and with the power it earns us, we will tear this realm apart.”
Riese let out a discontented rumble, but he nodded. “Yes, General.”
