//------------------------------//
// Change 
// Story: The Queen of Shadows 
// by megabyte97 
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	The door opens and I find myself face to face with three large rugged ponies. The one coming through the doorway is a little on the short side, wearing a beat up tux and top hat, the stallion has a grey coat of fur and is sporting a patchy black beard. The stallion to the right is much bigger, an earth pony with a blood red coat of fur and wearing a faded t-shirt that probably had writing on it once upon a time. The final stallion… the one on the left… is surprisingly… normal. This stallion made me tense, I never categorize anything that draws my attention as “normal” but as soon as my eyes leave him I find myself forgetting what he looks like, what he’s wearing, I can’t even remember what tribe he belongs to. I know that he is walking through the doorway, but he doesn’t matter in the slightest.

“Who are you, and why are you here?” I ask the stallion in the tux in a hypnotic voice.

The stallion blinks and shakes his head before looking at me with a smile that just seems wrong. “Well now aren’t you interesting? A wraith hiding out in a rundown apartment?” The stallion takes a step forward, “I would say I am surprised, but you’re the third one we’ve found in this city.”

I tilt our head slightly to the right, looking out the door to see if it’s still night outside, which it is. The stallion takes another step forward, and I call up my magic.

The stallion in the tux tenses and opens his mouth… I don’t give him a chance to speak.

An oversized hand made of shadows erupts from the ceiling and grabs the stallion’s muzzle and lifts him off the ground by it, he doesn’t even have time to yelp before he is dangling in the air. The other two stallions rush forward, or at least try to, they don’t make two steps before six more arms spring up from the floor and grab their legs, they yelp in surprise before falling face first onto the dusty floorboards.

The attackers are subdued for the moment but the loud noises seem to have woken Scootaloo if the arcane symbols going off behind me are any indication.

“What’s going on?” I hear the filly ask behind me. Turning around I see the wingless pegasus propping herself up on her elbow and rubbing the crust out of her eyes.

I don’t want her waking up right now, so I absolutely saturate my voice in magic and whisper to her, “Nothing Scootaloo, just go back to bed.” It isn’t a request, it’s a demand, one that is strangely effective.

“...Good night,” the orange filly mutters before rolling over and closing her eyes.

I quickly turn back to the stallions in the temporary shelter and take stock of the situation. The stallion in the tux is thrashing around in the air and clawing at the hand holding him up. The hand is smoldering at the points he is touching and I can feel a tingling feeling spread through it. The same thing is happening with the ponies on the floor, but they are restrained almost entirely face down, minimizing the effect of whatever they are doing by more than a few hands.

I want to question them, I really do, but the chance of them calling attention to me is too high.

The multitude of hands holding the two stallions to the floor start to pull downward and they start sinking into the shadows on the floor while another hand emerges from the ceiling right behind the stallion in the tux, grabbing his throat from behind and starting to squeeze. All three of the stallions’ struggling increases as they make muffled shouts and grunts. The stallion in the tux is the first to go, his movement stopping with a sudden and sickening snap before being dropped on the floor by the hands holding him. The other two stallions are swallowed by the shadows on the floor before anything breaks, but I don’t expect them to last long seeing as the dimension they are forced into is not meant for the living.

The room is silent once more as I walk up to the pony in the tux and crouch down to study him closer. It has been a long time since something has actually affected me and not just my host. I reach out and touch the pony’s neck with two of our fingers only to be surprised when I immediately strike gold. There are... patterns etched onto his skin hidden beneath his coat of fur which end very abruptly. I frown and push down a little harder trying to find where the markings continue only to find that they disappear once the marking meets a blood… vein…

I blink before tracing the veins to underneath the stallion’s muzzle and finding another marking similar to the first right under where the tongue would be.

‘Well now aren’t you interesting?’ I think with a raised eyebrow. An ethereal hand emerges from the floor to the right of the stallion’s corpse and places a finger upon the first marking, I hold it there for a few moments before I feel the appendage heating up. The ethereal hand pulls away and I smell that the fur under where the finger was is slightly charred. ‘Very interesting...’

I stare at the corpse for a while before making a decision. Multiple ethereal hands rise from the floor, shaping themselves into useful tools to serve the purpose I have in mind. The hands grab the tuxedo the stallion is still in and start ripping it apart. The corpse is naked a moment later, and the ethereal hands begin probing his form to find any other markings on it. A large amount of markings are found in the chest area, along with three in both arms and legs, with a final one on the top of the head. An ethereal hand with claws instead of fingers slides forward, places one of the sharp appendages to the corpse’s chest, and slowly drags downwards, a line of red trailing behind it in contrast to the body’s grey fur. Another clawed hand joins the first, making cuts at the top and bottom of the first line, making it look like a capital “I.” Two more hands join the claws and pull the skin away with a third providing a small flame to the right of the opening. I blink in surprise at what is there.

The organs and bones are still there, but there are symbols carved into them, these ones much more defined than the markings on the skin, and much more… potent. Another ethereal hand, wider and thinner than the rest, slides forward as the clawed hands dissipate to give it room. The wide hand places a finger upon the runes and our head jerks back as a snapping sound echos through the room and the bone basically explodes.

I suppress the urge to yelp as I feel tiny slivers of tainted bone pepper our face. The ethereal hands cover the corpse and quickly drag it into the dimension the other two ponies were pulled into as I shake our head in shock.

“...What the fuck?” I whisper in a daze. The realization that ponies could make defenses like the runes very eye opening.

‘I’ve been locked away for a long time… just how much has changed?’

My train of thought is derailed when I hear the sound of hooves just outside the door. A tall pegasus mare with grey fur and a blond mane walks through the doorway wearing a blue shirt and jeans. The mare looks at me with crooked golden eyes for a moment before bowing.

“Your majesty.”

Picking myself up off the floor the mare straightens and closes the door behind her before being enveloped by green flames. The pegasus is replaced by a earth pony mare around my host’s height, with a white coat of fur and a bright pink mane, wearing a long flowing blue robe depicting the stars.

I acknowledge the mare with a nod, “Starswirl.”

‘Perhaps it’s time to learn what all has changed in my absence.’