"Whoever said, 'When you look into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you' was a dumb shit. Darkness doesn't need an excuse to move in and put its feet up. Darkness is already there, waiting in every shadowed corner.
It's under your bed. It's in the closet. It's behind your eyelids. You won't need to go looking for darkness. You can push it back, for a little while, but the lights will always go out eventually and the abyss will be waiting.
Your foals will find this out when they grow up, whether you teach them or not. The only difference is that a prepared mind can survive in darkness."
- Submission from one 'Bad Egg- Veteran of the Crusades' to the Canterlot Daily Expounder, in response to an article regarding a proposal to remove certain aspects of the war from school textbooks.
----
My companions were rousing themselves as I came around the corner, using a leg on one cave wall to keep myself from staggering around like a toddler. For all the work Gale put in getting my mind-meat back into working order, I don’t think he’d had time to fix my inner ear; the world was still swimming from time to time. Bones followed along beside me, surreptitiously propping me up when I stumbled.
Firebrand sat beside the fire, gently stirring the coals with her claw. Swift was stuffing her muzzle with half a griffin field ration and Mags’ beak with the other half. Lily was despondently chewing on a rice cake, her dirty nurse’s scrubs discarded in a pile beside her, while Iris Jade sat next to her, a trio of rocks levitating in her magical field.
As we entered the cave, they all looked up. Lily’s face went immediately gray, and she dropped her meal on her hooves, but Swift just grinned, finished her bite, then offered another piece to Mags. Iris narrowed her eyes at me, and her rocks disintegrated into a pile of dust.
“Evening, ladies,” Bones cackled, plunking himself down beside the fire with a noise like a collapsing house made of sticks. “Miss Jade! Miss Lily! What’s with the long faces? You act like you’ve never seen a dead guy before!”
“That ‘long faces’ joke wasn’t funny the first time a griffin told it, Mister Bones,” Jade snapped, then turned and glared at me. “And you…”
I sat down across from her, warming my hooves over the flames. They were still a little cold and tingly.
“Yes?”
“You don’t get to die until I say you die!”
I felt a sharp swat on the end of my snout and looked up to see a magical construct in the shape of a rolled up newspaper dangling over my head. She quickly dispelled it.
“You know, I now have two mares holding that over my head?”
“I am completely aware! I got a full debrief from Miss Cuddles over there, and you are lucky I am no longer the Chief of Police!”
My ears flew straight up, and I jerked my head around. “Kid, you didn’t…”
Swift hesitated, then slowly swallowed the meat she had in her mouth and passed the rest of her ration to Mags, who began gleefully ripping it to pieces.
“Sir, she was...I mean...it...she threatened to stuff your head up your bottom and make me watch. I didn’t know if you could heal that!”
Mags - like most nine-year-olds - found this hilarious and pitched over backwards, giggling like a tickled goose.
“Yeah, laugh it up, catbutt,” I grumped, giving my ward a good poke in the belly.
“Heehee! Eggpony would look funny with he head up his toosh!” she squeaked, swatting at my leg with her claws.
“You think it’s funny, now. I watched her actually do that to a guy once, and he confessed, led us to his victims, and stood trial.” Shaking my head, I picked Mags up by the scruff of her neck and popped her down on my back. It felt good to have her back there, and she immediately latched onto my mane. “Well, nothing to be done, now. How many gaping holes in the story did my dear partner leave?”
“Too many,” Iris growled, thrusting herself up. “That house, for instance. After you croaked on the lawn, we waited till the fire died down, and I got a look through that place. There was enough molten gold in there to buy a private continent.”
“That place was the home of the ponies who set up the current late night horror double feature. I wasn’t aware that was what we were walking into, else I’d have just brought you along. There will be full disclosure soon, but we have an interrogation to conduct.” I tapped my chest with my toe. “Speaking of that, thanks for charging my ticker in a timely manner. I’d rather not go through rigor mortis more often than necessary.”
“If there’s a next time, I’m going to wait til you’re stiff as a board, you insufferable nit,” she replied.
I gave a shrug. “Eh, so long as you don’t tell Taxi.”
“Hrmph. Even I don’t want to watch you suffer that much.”
“So, where’d we put ‘Stumpy’?” I asked. “There are some... things we need to discuss, but we might as well see what she knows first. We’ll do a full debrief, including Bones’ intel, once we’ve got that.”
Bones waved a bony leg toward one of the other corridors. “She’s trussed up in that cave back there. Yon Miss Green-And-Deadly threw a magical nullification on her and I had to stop her biting her own tongue off, but we force fed her a few sedative herbs. They gentled her down good. Might have worn off by now, but the residual muscle relaxants should be enough to keep her from doing anything to herself.”
“Good, now--”
“Crusader,” Firebrand interjected, adjusting her mighty wings against her sides. I’d almost forgotten she was there. Dragons have a way of blending into the background when they want to.
“What is it?”
She subtly twitched one of her head-flukes, then her eyes off to her left. I followed her look until my gaze settled on Lily.
Poor Lily. She hadn’t moved since I came in and was still sitting there with the dropped rice cake and a blank expression. Her tail was tucked under her belly, and she looked like I’d just dropped a bomb in her lap.
“Uh...can I have the cave for a minute or two?”
Iris Jade glanced between Lily and I, then her horn lit up. Both Mags and Swift levitated into the air, to much flailing and screeching, before a glowing green bubble flashed over both of them. Inside it, my partner and ward banged on the inside of the shield, but there was no sound.
Bones got to his hooves, moving toward what I presumed was the hole where our prisoner was secreted away, followed a moment later by Jade and my erstwhile dependents. When they were gone, Firebrand rolled to her paws, picked a stray scale off of her chest and tossed it into the fire, then strolled off in the opposite direction, leaving Lily and I alone with the crackling fire.
Sitting there in the uncomfortable silence, I rubbed at the zipper on my chest, then sighed. “I’m going to get punched, aren’t I? Well, go on. Get it over with.”
Lily’s ear twitched, and then her lips slowly sank into a frown. “I think you need to find some friendlier mares, Hardy. All the ones in your life besides me either want to kill you or break all of your bones...”
“Besides you? That’s a nice change. One time I came back from the great beyond, I’m pretty sure Taxi shattered my skull in a couple places.”
“Ugh!” Shoving her hooves under herself, Lily trotted around the fire, her lovely red mane tumbling down her shoulders. “Do you know what it does to your friends when you take these sorts of risks? I mean, you told me you wouldn’t die, but there’s a difference between hearing somepony say that and feeling their pulse stop!”
I moved closer to the fire, letting the warmth seep into my skin and carefully not looking at her.
“Lily, if I’d had another option, don’t you think I’d have taken it?” I asked, softly.
Her teeth ground against one another as she stalked over and dropped in front of me, putting her muzzle inches from mine. “I don’t care about your ‘options’. I only care about what I see, and what I saw is you dying in front of me. I know you want to stay dead. Some part of you keeps trying, because you’re hoping it’ll stick one day.”
“That’s...probably true,” I conceded.
“Well, then if you die, I won’t watch Equestria freeze!” She poked me hard enough in the breastbone that it actually hurt as tears started running down her thin face and dripping off her jaw. “If there’s no hope, and you’re gone, then I’m going to go find something tall to jump off of!”
I lowered my head. “Lily, there are a bunch of ponies working to fix this situation--”
“No! Dammit!” She scooted forward with her back legs until she was chest to chest with me. “I don’t want to die, but if that’s what it takes for you to stop doing dumb things, I will be right in line behind you to meet the reaper! Do you hear me, Hard Boiled? Now, would you please hug me? I swear, you are the dumbest stallion in the entire world!”
I cautiously slid my forelegs around her neck, and she jammed her face into the crook of my shoulder, all but pulling me onto my side so she could get closer. A few seconds later, we were belly to belly, with her clutching me so tightly my back ached, but I wouldn’t have stopped her for the world. When the tears came, I was ready, though it was a bit of a shock to realize I was crying too. How long had it been since I’d felt even a little safe?
Days? Months? Years?
Yeah, definitely years.
Lily smelled terrible and her mane was lank with sweat, dried blood, and dirt, but that mattered not at all to a pony who was desperate for the grief to stop, even for a little while. That didn’t make her any less beautiful. Two months of absolute Tartarus does strange things to the mind.
It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes - although it felt like several hours - before we separated. I cupped her cheek in my hoof, and she rested her foreleg over mine, a crooked smile on her teary-eyed face.
“If you were one of the farm boys back home, I’d be dragging you into the barn for a roll in the hay about now. I could sure use it,” she giggled, though there wasn’t much humor behind it. “I hate this life so much I could just scream.”
I grimaced and put my forehead against hers. “Yeah, me too. On both counts. Still...there’s a prisoner to interrogate, some princesses to save, a war to wage, and a whole bunch of dead ponies to avenge.”
“Oh, fun, fun, fun…”
Reluctantly, I got to my hooves and offered her a leg. “Do you mind waiting out here?”
“Y-you’re not planning to torture her, are--”
“No, but let’s face it: she’s a mutated, brainwashed psychopath who tried to murder you, me, and Swift. This will not be a friendly conversation. We’re just lucky she didn’t bring any of the weirder beasties they threw at us at the Castle.”
“You mean those nasty things with the weird legs?” she asked.
“I...yes, those. When did you see them?”
Lily shivered, pulling her tail between her back legs and seeming to shrink in on herself. “They came out of the sky from all directions about twenty minutes after we left the woods. It was a whole pack, with some more troopers like the one you captured giving orders. They shot the truck with a bunch of lightning bolts. Then the creatures tried to tear it open. Miss Jade teleported outside and started fighting them with Swift, then Firebrand and some other dragons appeared and started cutting the monsters up like they were nothing. Then the truck wouldn’t start, so we had to carry you here.”
I peered at her out of one eye. “Wait. You’re saying my partner and Iris Jade fought a whole squad of berserkers, then dragons came and set fire to them...and I missed it? Skies above, I wish I’d been awake for that. Sounds like quite a show.”
“Oh...I...I guess it was. I was kind of focusing on keeping the truck on the road with your little griffin trying to climb my head and screaming about letting her out so she can ‘go kill the monsters’...”
Squashing the brim of my hat against my face, I said under my breath, “I swear, she’s got the self preservation instincts of a rabid mongoose on Beam…”
Lily giggled, putting her leg around my shoulders for a moment. “She reminds me of one of my friends’ little sister back home, except with more claws and better table manners. Go do your interrogation or whatever it is you’re going to do. I’ll see if I can whip together something tastier than those ration packs with what we salvaged from the truck.”
My stomach grumbled, and I winked at her. “Thanks. Being dead leaves a mighty appetite.”
Her horn sparked, and my hat mashed down over my eyes.
----
It was a short walk down the side passage to find my companions Bones was smoking again, Swift was sewing shut a tear in her armor with a bit of thread, and Iris seemed content to glare at the floor. Mags was asleep again, her fuzzy belly bulging with her latest meal. They were variously standing and lying in front of a rough, circular wooden door that looked like it might have been put in by the diamond dogs when they were still in residence.
“So, the fight at the mansion. What happened after I was out?” I asked.
Swift hesitated, her needle halfway to her work. “Not much, Sir. Not until we got out of the woods. The bodies of all of the PACT troopers burned up, same as the ones at the Castle. We tried to dig through the ashes of the house a bit, but I might have used a little too much kerosene.”
“And…’Stumpy’?” I asked, giving her a measured look.
It was Iris who answered, pulling her gaze off the floor. She sounded exhausted. “I scanned her. That’s harder than it sounds. That spell inside her has got a ton of redundancy built in, and I don’t know if nullifying her did a damn thing besides delay whatever transformation they’ve got her set to do. I’m no doctor, but even now, there’s not much left in there that you’d call a pony.”
Bones tucked his cigarette into the edge of his mouth, and his voice rattled around in my head, adding, “After she was sedated, I gave her a once over, too. Those crazy teeth aren’t bone. More like...organic steel."
“Organic steel? Like, steel that grows from flesh or something?”
“It was one of Apple Bloom’s little projects. The only one of us Crusaders brave enough to go for that enhancement was old Iron Butt, but then, Featherweight was always a little bit crazy. Figure he needed it considering how many times he took a picture of somepony who didn’t want their picture taken. Anyway, I wedged her mouth open with a stick so she wouldn’t go for her tongue, and she almost bit right through it. Jaw’s stronger, too. Hate for one of those things to get ahold of my fleshy bits, if I still had fleshy bits.”
I tilted my head in Swift’s direction. “Kid, you tried biting through any iron bars, lately?”
“No, Sir, but...I can crack a chicken bone with my back teeth like nopony’s business,” she replied.
“It’s worse than that,” Bones murmured. “She had a couple of my magical enhancements on her. They must have studied me pretty good while I was chained up down there. Tough little filly, this creature.”
“Alright, no sense sitting out here.” I put a hoof on the door and stopped, then turned to Swift. “Kid, you sure you want in on this? Lily could probably use some help with dinner if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“Um...I planned to, Sir…”
“I can pretty well guarantee this is going to put you off the lovely meal she is trying to make out of those ration packs.”
Swift chewed her lower lip with one of those ferocious canines. “I know, Sir. But I’m still a cop. Besides, I think that spot where I can ditch out of something just because it’s going to keep me up at night came and went a while ago.”
“Eh, alright. Be ready to rip her throat out if she gets loose.”
I pushed open the door and took the lead.
Our prisoner lay in the center of the little cave, stripped of her armor. Somepony had bandaged up the stump where her foreleg used to be and tied her back legs together, then wedged a rubber ball of some kind into her mouth and tied it in place with a kerchief. She was the color of fresh dandelions, but with a mane so black it looked like it’d been dipped in engine grease. Probably dyed. A thin, badly cracked horn poked up between her bangs, the very tip of which was broken and scabbed over.
Her eyes glinted in gentle, phosphorescent blue light coming from a number of mushrooms growing along the wall. She was the kind of muscular that comes from either magical enhancement or too many days spent in the gym, but despite the bulk, I estimated she was still only a half-head taller than Swift.
Maybe worst of all, her flank was entirely blank. No cutie-mark, nor even a sign that one had been there.
Trotting forward, I lowered myself down in front of her. She made no move to suggest she was aware of my presence, but her gaze still drifted from me to my companions and back again.
“Right,” I began, reaching out and gently adjusting one of her bonds that looked like it was cutting into her leg. “You’re aware of who I am, so we can skip the introductions. I could go the ‘kind and friendly’ method where we take that thing out of your mouth and ask some questions, but that’s going to end with you killing yourself or trying to kill us, isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, or so much as acknowledge that I was there. I got the distinct impression the lights were on but nobody was home. Reaching out, I clapped my hooves beside one of her ears; no reaction. Not even a twitch.
“Good. That’s good. Tells me most of what I need to know right there.” Without turning, I asked over my shoulder, “Iris?”
“Yes, Hard Boiled?”
“You ever take any classes on mind magic?”
Jade’s expression turned a bit dubious. “A fair bit, but I’m a tad rusty. Not much call for it as Chief of Police.”
“You scanned her, right?” I asked, and she nodded. “What’d you get for brain activity?”
She shook her head. “Well, she was unconscious--”
“Was she dreaming?”
Cautiously, Jade shook her head. “Now you mention it, no, she wasn’t. Even in a coma, there should be something.”
I waved her forward and took a few steps to one side. “Do it again. Focus on her brain. A deep telepathic scan. Let's see what she's thinking, if anything. I'm betting she's in some sort of trance, maybe with a bit more to it.”
“Sir, deep mind scanning is illegal without two party consent,” Swift said, softly.
Bones chose that moment to chime in. “You want consent, filly, I think I heard her say something like ‘Oh, yes, please dig into my mutant brain and figure out who turned me into a fel beasty set to end the world at my master’s behest’ sometime during the period between when I broke her horn and when I tied her up. That good enough for you?”
“Works for me,” Jade chuckled, her horn lighting up as she projected a thin ray of light across the PACT trooper’s head. It flickered for a moment, then stabilized. She leaned closer, eyes pinched shut, tail sweeping back and forth as she concentrated. After a solid minute, she let out a breath, and her horn blinked off. “Huh…”
When nothing else was forthcoming for a moment or two, I tapped her hindquarters.
“Jade?”
“What? Oh...yes. Just going over the information. Spells spit out a fair bit, and it takes a minute. When you get a horn and a few years of magical training, you can rush me.”
Bones puffed at his cigarette. “Rushing you wasn’t exactly on my grandson’s mind, Miss Jade, but for those of us who didn’t get the benefit of sitting on Mama Celestia’s lap at the School for Gifted Unicorns, the anticipation is downright devilish. What’d you find?”
She let her back knees slide out from under her and sat down, heavily. “Well, since you lot are asking me to summarize an encyclopedia, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say somepony cracked her head open and pissed acid on her prefrontal cortex. She's got no surface thoughts. Not even dreams.”
Reaching out, she flicked the filly on the head, still getting no reaction.
Jade continued, “I mean, it’s basically the same structure as a pony brain, but all the parts that govern active consciousness are atrophied or missing, replaced with magically dependent organ structures I wouldn't even want to begin to guess the purpose of. I doubt without a healthy, regular dose of some sort of very particular magic that she’d be able to do anything more dangerous than lie there and drool. She might have a subconscious, but that's it.” She glanced over at me and got a bit of a coy look. “Now I mention it, it’s pretty much what I picture Hard Boiled’s brain looking like, but with less of an irritating moral code wedged in there.”
“I love you, too, Iris,” I grunted. “Still, I bet you that magic in her system is designed to cook her if she’s caught. Not just a suicidal impulse, but a back up, and a safety.”
“No, it’s more structured than that,” Jade murmured. “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s some kind of automaton. Wind her up and watch her go, but let the clockwork stop and she just sort of lies down and dies.”
“You mean somepony can...can take over her body and control it?” Swift asked, nervously nudging her trigger with her fetlock.
“Possibly that, but I suspect it’s more like they grant her consciousness,” Jade amended. “She’d have limited cognition, but only so long as whoever holds her strings wants her to dance. Some necromancers like their minions with a bit of ‘life’ in them. This is some nasty modification of that principle, seeing as she’s not physically dead, yet. I imagine if we leave her like this a couple days, she’ll die of dehydration. After that, her body will probably burn, same as the others.”
Swift took a step or two closer to the mare and lightly touched her face. “You’re...you’re saying if Tourniquet hadn’t stopped it, I’d have ended up a puppet or vegetable?”
“Most likely,” Jade replied, then clapped her hooves together. “Still, her memory centers have a bit of juice left! Shall we have a peek at what’s still there? I’ve got a spell that’ll patch somepony into whatever is left in short term. Probably no more than a few weeks worth, but if she's seen anything that left an impression, it should still be in there.”
“You mean...p-poke around in a...a dead pony’s memories?” my partner squeaked.
“Mind ripping a prisoner, huh?” Bones mused. “Haven’t done that in a few years. Hardy, me old son, you keep piling on the treats, don’t you? I have barely a day out of the dark, find out the planet is headed into the crapper again, and now we get to do a jig in this mare’s brain box. Remind me again, why’d I think joining the military was a good idea?”
“Damn if I know,” I sighed. “I’m still asking myself why ‘cops and robbers’ seemed fun back when I was a kid.”
“Probably runs in your blood. You want to do the deed, or shall I?”
“It’ll have to be Hard Boiled,” Jaded cut in, “I’ve no idea how my magic will interact with...whatever is keeping you animated, Mister Bones.”
“What about me?” Swift asked, raising one thin eyebrow. “I could do it!”
“Yeah, but if there are any more jack-in-the-boxes, do you want to risk ending up like her?” I asked, flicking my tail at the trooper. “Or would you rather send in the pony who can get brain surgery from a power socket?”
Swift bared her teeth at the thought. “Oooh...now that you mention it…”
“Heh, I promise I won’t spare you the grisly details, kid.”
“That’s not better, Sir…”
Moving around to the PACT trooper’s head, I lowered myself into a comfortable sitting position, tucked my tail around my flank, and looked into her glazed, empty eyes. Nothing in her slack-jawed expression suggested there was anything in there. I’d seen that same look on repeated drug overdosers; some basic lizard-brain reflex actions like the ability to breathe and not much else.
“What about her old personality?” I asked, raising my head.
Jade blew a strand of lank, green hair out of her face and shrugged. “What about it? She’s dead to all intents and purposes. Her body just hasn’t figured it out, yet. You might run into a few fragmentary elements of her psyche. Not as though it matters.”
“Ah. Not comforting, but then, I should have remembered who I was talking to. Speaking of that, you’re not doing this as an excuse to dig through my brain, are you?”
“Hard Boiled, if I wanted to dig through your head, all I’d have to do is hold you down for a few hours while you writhe, cry, and beg for mercy,” she replied, cheerily. “Keep in mind, in this pleasant dream I don’t have any reason to give you mercy, and once I’m done prying every last secret from that ridiculous little mind of yours, the last thing you see before you die is my huge, satisfied grin as I rip your limbs off and make a lovely little tea-table out of the rest where I will rest my tired hooves until the end of time.” The smile that’d been growing on her face vanished, and she leaned a little closer. “Meanwhile, I need you alive, both for that gun on your leg and your contacts back in Detrot. So shut up and try to hold still, or your head might explode.”
I don’t know what I would have said to that, but I’m sure there was a classic, cutting quip circling my tongue. Unfortunate, then, that it never saw the light of day. Iris Jade, for all her faults, was a very competent magician. Worse, she was one with almost perfect timing.
Her horn glowed, and I pitched forward over the PACT trooper.
----
It occurred to me some time later that I’d been pitching forward for a very, very long period; a few minutes, at least. Maybe an hour or two. It couldn’t have been that long, because Swift was still looking aghast at Iris Jade, while Bones hadn’t much of an expression, but did seem as though he might be amused. I was getting pretty good at reading the skeleton’s emotions, in spite of his lack of flesh.
Turning my attention back to my target, I peered down into the helpless mare’s face.
Her pupils were growing steadily larger, dripping out from her eyeballs like a creeping spillage of ink. I could feel the tingle of magic pulsating through my nervous system like a feather working its way up my spine. The intense urge to scratch was made all the worse by how impossible it was to move so much as a muscle.
I sank, a sailor on rough seas tumbling end over end as the waters rise up to claim him.
‘Well, this is fun,’ I thought, distantly aware that the black sludge inching up from the body in front of me had consumed my friends, the walls, the door, and my entire world. With that realization came fear. It wasn’t fear as I was used to. Not a sense of dread, or terror, but something worse.
Invasion. I was being invaded.
I struggled, but the invader wouldn’t leave. He was there, at the edges of my consciousness, pushing through into my mind. We fought, wrestling with each other for several minutes in the darkness before my eyes popped open so I could finally see my attacker.
It was a stallion, with a dark pelt and grey mane, his eyes golden and his teeth bared. He looked, if anything, as frightened as I felt.
As our gazes met, he relaxed, his body drifting away from mine, hanging there some short distance away, just watching me.
Suddenly, our perspectives were reversed. I was the stallion, and there was a mare not far from me, her tail flailing at the air as she tried to gain some purchase on the nonexistent ground
‘Oh...this is going to be one of those existential nightmares,’ I thought.
“H-hello?” she stammered, bringing one hoof up to touch her face, then her belly and fetlocks. “Wh-who are you? Where am I? What do you mean ‘existential n-nightmare’?”
‘Great. She can hear me thinking. Best not tell her she’s dead. Oh...crap!’
“I’m what?!” she gasped. “S-say that again?!”
I regarded her, studying her pink face and fearful eyes. As she opened her muzzle, I caught a glimpse of her teeth: flat, normal equine dentition. Her cutie-mark was back, too: three cards, tucked one over top of the other, ace, queen, and king.
“You don’t know who I am?” I asked.
“N-no! Where am I? I w-want to go home!” She quivered, then hugged herself, drawing her rear legs up against her stomach. “I did my patrol! There’s nopony there! I’m not dead, am I? This is just a dream! My wife’s waiting on me! I’ve got to get home!”
‘Fragments of her psyche’, Iris Jade said. ‘Doesn’t matter’, she said. ‘Dead already’, she said.
Still, my every sense was telling me there was a frightened, upset pony dangling in the void right there in front of me. Her lip quivered as she looked over her hooves at me with big, tear-filled eyes. “P-please. Can I go home?”
“Look, Miss, I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong hoof, here. What’s your name?” I asked.
It took her a moment to respond, and when she did, it was with a distinct note of uncertainty.
“Holly...no...wait, that’s not right. My name...my name is Hollyhock. Oh, why is it so hard to remember?!” She clutched her head with both hooves, then glanced up at me. “Who are you?”
“My name is Hard Boiled.”
At the sound of my name, a flash of light smote the air between us. For an instant, a window formed into another place, and another time; I could see myself standing on the porch of the Family’s house, illuminated by the flashlights of several P.A.C.T. troopers. After a second, the burst was gone.
“Y-you’re the...The Detective...I think I was supposed to find you and ask you something. No, I was supposed to tell you something!” A frown crossed her square-jawed features. “Do you know me?”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Hollyhock. I wish I could get to know you, but I’m afraid we’re short of time.”
“I...I know,” she muttered, and then a look of realization flashed across her face as a few tears started to trickle down her nose, vanishing before they dripped away. “You...you cut off my leg! But it wasn’t me. My body tried... tried to kill you. I’m so sorry! It was the other one. Th-that thing that comes and takes me away and wears my body. Why does it do that?”
“There’s too much to say, and not enough time. I need to know if you know who did this to you and where they are.”
An image appeared, floating between us, of Holly staring into a bathroom mirror, inspecting her teeth. They looked like Swift’s in their earliest stages of her transformation, rather than that horrible mouth full of cutting edges that I’d seen during our battle. From somewhere nearby, a soft, melodic voice called out, “Holly, come back to bed. It’s too early to be up.”
Holly’s voice called back, “I’ll be right there, sweetie. Just need to call my dentist--”
The image vanished, replaced an instant later by a scene of horror.
Hollyhock was looking down at a mutilated body sprawled on a bed. It was a mare’s body, young and lithe, with a sheet draped across her lower legs. Blood was spattered everywhere, pouring off the covers in great rivulets, dripping from Holly’s muzzle, and running down her chest. Holly’s pink fur was stained purple by it, and the pony on the bed’s eyes were fixed on hers, reflecting fear, pain, and confusion. The mare’s throat was gone, torn out as though by a wild animal.
As quick as it came, the memory was gone.
“What...what was that?!” Hollyhock gasped, spinning in the air.
“Nothing. It was nothing. Probably something from a bad dream,” I said quickly, trying to calm her before she realized exactly what we’d just seen. “Listen to me. The pony who gave you your orders. The pony who told you to find me. Can you remember them?”
“I...I don’t…” Her terrified eyes drifted down for a second, but then she blinked.
Another flash, and another memory appeared from the aether.
Hollyhock was looking at somepony in full armor that covered every inch of their body. They were even wearing a balaclava and sporting two gigantic gun turrets on their back, each covered in enough runework and magical symbols to blanket their surfaces. He - and I had no doubt it was a he - was a giant of a pony, muscular, and with a broad forehead. All I could see of his face was two gleaming, green eyes.
“Operative, you will find the stallion named Hard Boiled,” said a voice, deep and baritone. “Kill or take his companions hostage as necessary to gain his cooperation. Once you have it, recover the Helm of Nightmare Moon. It will be in his possession, or he will know its location. Once you have him, keep him alive and return him to a secure holding facility until you are called for. Based on the latest recon, he’s left the Castle and headed out of the city. You will have backup. Proceed to the coordinates given, ensure the property there is undamaged, and retrieve Hard Boiled.”
Hollyhock’s eyes were fixed straight ahead at the image, then, but in the memory, her lips moved. “Likely resistance?”
“He’s traveling with several unknown individuals, but if two xeno-squads cannot deal with one alcoholic and his friends, I may need to reevaluate our training regime,” the stallion chuckled. The image froze, hanging in place between us.
“Who is that? What’s a xeno-squad?” I asked, holding up one leg as Holly stared at the armored pony.
“I...I don’t know. He’s...he’s somepony important.” She hesitated off for a moment, then whispered, “M-master. Cannon. D-dragon-Eater...” Her ears drooped as she looked down at herself, then hugged her chest. “I’m sorry. I’m not very helpful. Everything feels strange, like my head is two sizes too small. I can’t think...”
It was just then that I noticed the ‘air’ or whatever we were dangling in was becoming strangely thick. More than thick. It swirled around my hooves, pulling and toying with them.
Just then, something wriggled in the back of my head. There was a strange sensation of creeping awareness that I’d learned to pay a certain amount of heed to and that tended to portend imminent violence; the two of us weren’t entirely alone.
As the presence began to grow in strength, my ethereal body started to ache in the oddest fashion. Hollyhock seemed unaware of the change, but then she was mostly sobbing into her fetlocks.
“Jade? If you’re up there, I think I should probably get out, now,” I tried to mentally whisper.
Somewhere, above me, I felt a jerk, then a judder, followed by a violent rocking that sent me spinning head her hooves across the void. What felt like tentacles grabbed hold of my back legs and began to yank in what I was generally thinking of as ‘down’.
Panic set in almost immediately as I was torn loose from whatever anchored me and began to spiral down into the dark. Simultaneously, a sharp pricking began to worm its way between my eyes. It was like something was trying to burrow its way into my brain. A gout of blood shot from my forehead, spreading out in a weightless cloud before vanishing.
Invasion.
They’re coming in.
Screaming. Was that me screaming? Yes, it was.
I fought, or at least, I think I did, but whatever was in there was more powerful, smarter, and infinitely stronger than my feeble thoughts.
‘Let us see what is inside this little mind of yours, Detective…’
Just as I felt myself begin to slip, a pair of grasping hooves caught me under the forelegs. I looked up into Hollyhock’s scared face as she heaved me upwards, momentarily breaking the grasp of the thing around my legs. Despite the fear in her eyes, she had a determined set to her jaw as she began to draw us higher and higher.
“N-no! Not yours! Y-you took my sweetie!” she shrieked, as one of the invisible, grasping limbs tried to wrap itself around my middle for a better grip.
More blood began to spill from my legs as the presence started to rip at me with what felt like barbed hooks. I still couldn’t see anything, but the damage seemed real enough. I could still hear that agonized screaming, coming from somewhere in the vicinity of my face.
“Fight! Fight them! They’re afraid of you and they did...they did something to me and I need you to wake up and go back and find the bunker! Yes! Go to the bunker in the sky! Everything is there! It’s all there!”
Hollyhock’s form brightened a little, and then the fur around her forelegs seemed to catch fire. I watched all of this, my own bleeding, my screams, the flames licking and boiling the girl’s flesh, from a detached point some distance away. After a few seconds, I decided I didn’t really want to see any more, especially as the fire was spreading, engulfing my body.
Was it my body? No. She believed it was, but that was good.
Ponies should never burn alone.
The presence had faded as soon as the fire was lit.
Hollyhock burned. The void burned.
Time resumed.
----
As my awareness settled back into my flesh, I found myself lying on the floor of the cave, with pebbles digging into my stomach and my cheek resting across one of my own forelegs. My neck ached, and the fur on my face felt hot, but otherwise I didn’t seem to be any the worse for wear. Tired, certainly, but uninjured.
My thoughts felt muddled and distant, but maybe that was for the best. Even my emotions seemed muted and far away.
A voice spoke, and it took me a second to realize the source wasn’t inside my own head.
“Well, damn, Miss Jade. Remind me never to let you perform cranial surgery on me if I ever have a brain again. She’s deader than a whole truckload o’ doornails.”
Bones. My grandfather. Why was he there?
“She was, to all intents and purposes, dead already, Mister Bones. Penetrating a pony’s mind that has had that many enchantments laid on it is dangerous, and we were short of time. Some sort of 'booby trap' went off and I had to brute force it a little.”
That was Iris Jade. Another strange inclusion to my evening.
“Oh my skies, d-did you boil her brain, Ma’am?! Her eyes are all...drippy...”
Swift. Oh, sweet Swift. Thank goodness.
I blinked a few times to clear my eyes and began to sit up, then almost planted my forehead back in the dirt as all the strength seemed to go out of my shoulders. A warm leg slid under my chest, holding me upright, and I turned my head as much as I could to see my partner’s worried face.
“Easy, Sir. Are you okay?” she asked softly.
“Never...never better? I think,” I replied, and then my chest seized and I doubled over. Swift moved to catch me, but I swept her into a hug that made her yelp as I smushed her against me. “Swift really is excellent. She’s the best partner I’ve had since Juniper. I wish I could tell her that sometimes, but I wouldn’t want her to start getting an ego, because egos are how ponies get killed. Wait, did I say that out loud? Why am I saying this out loud? Oh, I think Swift is having trouble breathing. I should probably let her go. I don’t want to, though! I want to hug more fluffy pegasus! No, she’s turning a bit blue. I should let her go.”
I clapped a hoof over my own muzzle and quickly released my partner from the crushing hug. She drew in deep, gasping breaths, dragging herself away a couple of steps to sit, staring at me with round eyes.
“Hard Boiled?” Iris Jade prompted, giving me a critical eye. “I won’t ask if you’re ‘alright’, because the answer is obviously ‘no’, but I am curious what’s wrong with you.”
Cautiously, I took my toe out of my mouth and drew in a breath to tell her.
“I wish she’d stop threatening ponies. She’d be a much nicer pony if she was nice and maybe she’d even be worth kissing if she wasn’t so inclined to hurt everyone all the time. Oh skies, I am saying this with my lips! I hope she never finds out that her secretary used to have a crush on her or she’d kill him and he was a nice pony. What do--”
I rammed my hoof back into my lips so hard I almost choked. Iris Jade’s pencil thin eyebrows crawled upward an inch or two.
“Boy’s head took a beating recently,” Bones explained, carefully taking my chin in his hoof and turning me to face his skinless eyes. “Probably lost his internal monologue. Happens with brain damage, sometimes. Had a buddy in the war who had to cast a soundproofing spell on his own mouth every morning after he took a bit of shrapnel in the back of the head. Friends thought he’d become the quietest pony they ever met and his lips just moved of their own accord. Turned out it just created a motormouth who didn’t want to bother anyone.”
“Too much magic. He’s lucky I yanked him out when I did,” Jade added. “Another twenty seconds and we’d get to see just how many strokes he can survive in a day.”
Clenching my teeth on my own tongue, I stepped back and peered around his shoulder at the remains of poor Hollyhock. She lay on her side, her face badly burnt and her horn shattered into two pieces, the tip still trickling smoke. Blackened blood had fountained from her horn when it broke and been almost instantly carbonized, leaving her unrecognizable as the mare I’d seen in her mind just a few minutes ago.
My cutie-mark twinged, and I shut my eyes against the sight. More innocents, dying for their innocence.
“Mmmgluuhmmmgl,” I muttered, still holding on to my tongue.
“Sir?”
I shook my head, and let the words flow. “I need to be alone right now until Gale fixes my brain. My emotions are making me want to hurt myself and I’d appreciate it if nopony disturbed me for several minutes while I cry over this good pony who died to give me information that means nothing to me but might save all our lives and--”
I bit down on my fetlock again and the room was deathly silent.
----
I stood under the eclipse, sweat pouring off of my mane as the shovel bit into the sandy dirt outside the cave again and again. It was a good feeling to dig. Digging was simple. Anypony can dig. Maybe that’s why we’ve been known to bury our dead for so very long.
It’s not for the dead to feel comforted in their graves. It’s for the living to have something to do.
If nothing else, digging a nice deep hole distracted me from the constant stream of consciousness.
I tuned it in for a moment.
“--and that’s why I don’t think I should be listening to myself, because every time I do there’s nothing intelligent coming out and a whole lot of ridiculous blather--”
And tune out again.
Dig the hole. Bury the body.
I was still very carefully not looking at the wasted mess that Iris Jade’s magic had left. Carrying Hollyhock outside was difficult and my legs wobbled, but I wouldn’t accept help. It was my duty and responsibility. Why? I’d no idea. I’d finally been reduced to telling my compatriots that my cutie-mark said so. It was a lie, but there are plenty of lies I’ve told that I’ll feel guiltier about in the long run.
The questions she’d left me with weren’t the sort that a pony can really think on with a dead body lying there. They were the sort you needed to dig a hole for.
Why had Hollyhock tried to save me? Strange notion, that a mare I’d just met would try to pull me back from the brink of some kind of attack. Had it been an attack? I certainly felt like there was something else inside her head with us. Considering what Jade said about the nature of the magics which were controlling poor Holly, it was a definite maybe.
Getting to watch the transformation from the inside didn’t engender me with many kind feelings towards the Family or ‘DW’. Having their names made me feel a bit less like I was chasing my own tail, but most of the government was still on the moon and my city still verged on bloody warfare in the streets. Burning their house to the ground felt pretty good, though.
How much of my current condition was a steady supply of crazy, and how much of it was blood pooling in my noggin? Hard to say.
Tune in.
“--and anytime Gale wanted to fix this, I swear, I’ll eat less cream cheese and charge my heart every time I’m anywhere near a socket--”
Tune out.
The hole was about a meter deep, but it was probably enough to ensure no one would mess with Hollyhock’s body. A shallow grave in a quarry, unmarked and unassuming, for a pony who’d died trying to tell me something that might save the world. Would I remember to come and move her remains once everything was said and done?
“I’ll remind you.”
A voice broke through my thoughts, and I looked up to find Lily leaning against wall of the cave entrance. Her kindly eyes were full of pity. Of course, it would have been hard not to look on the pathetic disaster of a too-thin and desperately threadbare Detective digging in the mud to bury a corpse with a tiny bit of pity.
“You’re still saying everything you think out loud, you know,” Lily added, softly. “Can I at least help you put her in?”
Smearing caked on dirt across my brow, I nodded. “I’m sorry if I’ve been an ass the last couple hours. Hard to tell what is coming out of my mouth. I can feel the ghost that lives in my chest working on the problem. Not the worst thing that’s happened to me today. I’d appreciate the help, but I think I should probably tell Lily not to help me, because I’d like to seem a little bit tough.” I hefted myself out of the pit and shook the filth out of my tail. “Even in this condition, what she thinks of me is important. I’m pretty sure I have a crush on her. That doesn’t matter, though. If she’s got any brains at all, she’ll head for the hills the second we’re out of here.”
“Then you’re lucky I’m just a dumb farm girl, Hard Boiled. You owe me revenge, still,” she murmured, tentatively inspecting the body of Hollyhock. “Mercy. I’ve seen too much death, lately. You said something earlier about her saving you from...someone while you were inside her head?”
“I did? Can’t remember what I’ve said and what I haven’t. Yes, I’ll accept Lily’s help. I don’t mind it, now that she’s talking to me. It can’t be any worse than her hearing my innermost thoughts.”
“I promise, I’ll be gentle with her. Move over a little.” Shutting her eyes, Lily lowered her horn, and a strong glow suffused the air around Holly. Her ruined body lifted limply off the ground, dripping what vital fluids hadn’t solidified, and floated gently into the hole, nestling down in the bottom.
“I wish we’d thought to grab her leg,” I muttered, turning to the pile of dirt I’d left beside the grave. “Feels poor not burying all of her.”
“You’re burying her. That’s what matters.” Lily hesitated a moment, a quizzical look on her face. “I wonder why she didn’t burn up like the others.”
“What?”
“The other troopers. They all burned up after they died. Why didn’t she?”
I shrugged, pushing a leg-load of dirt over Hollyhock’s legs.
“Who knows? Jade was running enough magic through her body to cook a dragon egg sunny-side up. It might have broken the spell.”
“Miss Jade said she was probably just operating on some sort of magical program that let her follow orders and interact with people, like one of those counting machines,” she said, shifting a pile of dirt onto the mare’s body. “I wonder if she could still feel pain, or if they took that, too.”
“Maybe. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to avoid killing these things. There are too many ponies relying on me for me to try to help the ones who’re already lost.”
I expected some sort of reproach for that statement, but instead she just continued moving soil over the grave. Some minutes later, the job was done. We patted down the last few hooffulls of dirt and stacked up a short pile of rocks for a cairn to mark the spot.
Standing there, sweaty and hot, in the slightly chilly air with our breaths steaming in front of us and crickets ratcheting in the distance, I felt myself overcome with an intense melancholy.
“Can still hear you...”
“I have no bagels and I just buried a body! Lemme brood!”