Having returned to material form, Lex led Fencer back through the maze of crates, yanking on her black-crystal leash every time she fell behind, which was quite often due to her injured hoof, inability to see in the dark, and the shackles around her legs.
Each silent reprimand brought a grunt of discomfort from her lips, and Lex couldn’t help but feel a sense of spiteful satisfaction with every such noise she made. Although he knew it was unseemly to take any sort of pleasure in another pony’s pain, there was nothing wrong with a feeling of gratification at seeing a criminal labor under the punishment for their wrongdoings. And this is just the beginning, you heartless thug, he thought darkly, glancing back at his prisoner. You will regret what you’ve done today for a long, long time.
But as much as he loathed Fencer, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief that he had gotten to her before those ghouls had begun to tear her apart. Taking the time to mark their passing and mentally map out the maze had been more worthwhile than he’d initially thought. If he hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have been able to find her in time, and that would have been tragic. No matter how much her callous disregard for other ponies angered him, she didn’t deserve to die for it. Nopony did. His moral code was absolutely clear on that: pony lives were utterly sacrosanct, and had to be preserved at all costs.
The chain grew taut in his telekinetic grasp, and he gave it another tug, hearing her stumble as she tried not to fall over. “Keep moving,” he ordered coldly. The slightest glance over his shoulder was enough to make her flinch, struggling to comply. Despite her efforts, however, she was unable to keep up with the pace he was setting, and he soon found himself tugging on her leash again.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to continue doing so for long. Up ahead he could already see the light of Cozy’s spell from around a corner. Turning it, he found her exactly where he had left her, fretfully standing vigil over her husband, Severance orbiting them protectively. As she saw him, she rushed past the weapon and ran over to him, her face riddled with anxiety. “He won’t wake up!” she blurted. “I healed his wounds but he feels feverish and he’s barely breathing and his pulse is weak and he won’t wake up!” She almost yelled that last part, stopping only to take a breath before she continued. “You can fix him, right? Just like you did with Drafty?”
Lex shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do for him right now.”
“But-”
“Be quiet!” snapped Lex. Although he knew that Cozy had good reason for not being at her best right now, he nevertheless found her near-hysterical behavior irritating. She had a predilection for panicking, he knew – that much had been amply demonstrated when she had descended into a fit of screaming during their first meeting – but he couldn’t help but feel contemptuous towards her for it. A crisis was when it was most important to remain levelheaded, and in that regard Cozy had proven herself to be unreliable. That, along with her healing magic, was why he hadn’t wanted her anywhere near the front lines of the battle against those aquatic monsters. “I already used my disease-removing spell this morning, on the last pony that was infected by that aboleth thing,” he explained. “But an illness is the less immediate concern. Your husband’s isolation here has doubtlessly left him dehydrated and starving. That isn’t something my magic can fix.” The words left a bitter taste in his mouth, the same way they always did when he had to acknowledge his limitations.
“But you can create food and water!”
“Which I already did back at the shelter,” he replied as he stepped around her. A quick glance at Severance and a muttered “guard her” sent the weapon to hovering near Fencer, who flinched at the sight of it. Lex had just enough time to enjoy another spate of hateful satisfaction at the sight, and appreciate Severance’s ability to keep troublemakers in line, before he turned his eyes to Pillowcase.
“So just cast the spell again!” insisted Cozy, apparently not finished making a nuisance out of herself.
“Simply shoving food and water down his throat won’t be enough to help him.” That, and he had too little magic left to use the spell again, particularly after expending his circlet’s magic to stretch his available sacerdotal thaumaturgy to the point of being able to create food and cure that other pony’s medical condition both in the same day. “He needs medical attention, professional medical attention. We have to get him back to the doctors at the shelter.”
“Okay,” nodded Cozy, regaining some measure of calm now that there was a clear goal to focus on. She worriedly looked at Pillowcase for a long moment before biting her lip and looking back towards the end of the hallway, wondering about how they were going to carry Pillow out of there while making him as comfortable as possible, only to do a double-take as she saw Fencer, not even having noticed the other mare in her worry.
For a long moment she just stared at her, struggling to process her feelings. She was still hurt and angry over how Fencer had threatened Pillow’s life, treating it as though it were nothing. But looking at her now…she almost looked like a completely different pony. Her ears were folded back, clearly telegraphing the stricken expression on her face, which was further marred with tear tracks as well as blood trails from her severed horn. The way she was favoring her left foreleg was obvious, and there were scratches along her belly as well.
But what was more notable was what wasn’t there. The mare in front of Cozy’s eyes didn’t have any trace of the arrogant cruelty that she’d displayed just a few minutes prior. It had all been completely replaced with misery and anguish. It was enough to make her wonder what exactly had happened during those few minutes when she’d run off and Lex had gone after her.
“When this city fell apart, nopony cared about the ponies important to me!” Fencer’s words came back to her then, and Cozy felt her anger begin to recede as a sudden surge of pity for the other mare washed over her. Fencer had mentioned something about her father, and from what she’d said it was obvious that he hadn’t made it.
Could that have been me? wondered Cozy. If Pillow hadn’t survived, and if I didn’t have Aisle and Cloudbank and Drafty there with me, could I have ended up like her? It was easy to tell herself that she never would have become so horrible, that she would have stayed strong and remained a good pony no matter what happened...but the thought had an undercurrent of uncertainty to it, and that was enough to change her pity to sympathy.
Closing her eyes, Cozy put a hoof to her necklace, touching Lashtada’s holy symbol and drawing strength from its reminder of her goddess’s presence. Take care to show love even to those who wrong you, she recited the teaching she’d learned from Princess Cadance silently, for though you may see them as the least deserving, they’re often the ones most in need of it. Opening her eyes as she let out a slow breath, Cozy knew what she had to do, walking over to Fencer. “I’ll heal your wounds.”
“No,” interjected Lex immediately. “Do not heal her.”
“Wh-, but she’s hurt!” protested Cozy, slightly surprised by the command. She had thought that she was starting to understand him a little more. He’d seemed to lack any sort of personal concern for the ponies around him, but he’d always been keenly interested in their basic physical well-being. Was he so angry at Fencer that he wanted to leave her in pain?
Having paused midway through withdrawing something from his haversack, Lex gave Cozy a flat look. “Can you control precisely what injuries your magic repairs?”
Cozy’s brow furrowed, not sure what to make of the question. “What?”
“Does your healing magic allow for you to selectively restore certain injuries and leave others alone?”
“No,” she conceded, still not sure what he was asking. “I mean, it seems to always fix the worst injuries first, but I’m pretty sure that they all get at least a little better. The magic knows what to do without me telling it.”
“And it can neither regrow nor reattach severed body parts, can it?”
Confusion clouded Cozy’s features. “Severed body parts? What-” Her question was cut off as Lex telekinetically lifted Fencer’s horn, banishing the black crystals from it with a thought. Suddenly she knew exactly what he was talking about. “Oh!”
Lex nodded. “If you healed her, her horn would scab over, ruining any chance the doctors would have of reattaching her horn.”
For the first time since they’d returned, Fencer spoke up. “Y-you’re going to put my horn back?” Her voice almost made Cozy wince, the desperate hope she heard there further driving home her certainty that this wasn’t the same person who had threatened to shove a broken piece of wood through her husband’s throat.
Lex didn’t seem to be similarly moved, giving Fencer a look of disgust. “I don’t believe in killing ponies, nor mutilating them. If the doctors can save your horn, then I’ll have them do it. But don’t think for an instant that means you’re going to be shown any leniency for what you’ve done.” He then turned back to what he was doing, drawing a yellow gemstone from his haversack. Holding it in his hoof, he murmured the words necessary to draw forth the spell contained within it. A moment later the gemstone crumbled to dust, even as a horizontal disk of force three feet in diameter sprang into existence in front of him.
Storing spells inside gemstones was one of the very first compensatory methods he had come up with when he’d initially invented his thaumaturgical spellcasting. It had seemed self-evident that gemstones could be utilized to store magical energy; the Elements of Harmony and the Crystal Heart made that extremely obvious, or so he’d thought at the time. However, although it hadn’t been very difficult to study gemstones to the point of making his theory into a reality – much to his mother’s delight, since being a lapidary was her special talent – the practical applications had left much to be desired.
Since he hadn’t been able to replenish his magic except on solstices or equinoxes, Lex had hoped that imbuing gemstones with magic would let him sidestep that particular limitation. That by using a gemstone to contain a spell, it would act as an amplifier – which he’d theorized was what the Elements and the Crystal Heart were – and so let him call upon the stored magic at will, over and over again without limit. The results of his experiments, however, had been disappointing.
While he could cast a spell into a gem, once invoked the gem would release that single casting, and that was it. If he wanted the gem to release multiple castings, then he had to imbue it with multiple castings first. Rather than acting as an amplifier, the gem was nothing more than a container, offering no greater output than what he’d put into it and so not allowing him to use his new magic any more frequently than he could before. That releasing the stored magic caused the gem to corrode into dust, denying him the ability to even use it again later, was simply an insult on top of the metaphorical injury (as was his mother confirming that the dust was little more than rather coarse sand, and as such utterly worthless).
With little to show for his work, Lex had turned to other ways of compensating for his thaumaturgy’s shortcomings. Still, the use of spell-embedded gemstones hadn’t been entirely fruitless. As they essentially allowed him to externalize his prepared spells, he’d taken to treating them as a sort of auxiliary reserve for spells with particularly specialized applications. A spell to prevent a corpse from rotting wasn’t one that he’d bother to prepare under most circumstances, but could conceivably be required under a particularly unusual confluence of events. By storing such a spell in a gem, he could have it on hoof when necessary without bothering to prepare it directly. As such, his entire reserve of spell-imbued gemstones were filled with spells of limited utility, such as the load-bearing disk he’d just conjured. It was useless in a fight, to be sure, but very valuable when needing to carry an unconscious pony.
Of course, he had no intention of explaining any of that to Cozy. “We’ll transport your husband on this. You stay next to him and make sure that he doesn’t slip off.” Even as he spoke, he grabbed Pillowcase with his telekinesis, straining as he struggled to lift the unconscious pony’s body onto the floating force-disk. It took some effort, but he managed to get the crystal stallion onto the apparatus, though his hooves dangled over the edge in what looked like a rather uncomfortable position. Cozy immediately moved to his side, trying to arrange him in a more comfortable-looking state.
Ignoring her, Lex returned his gaze to Fencer. “In the meantime, you’ll tell me everything you know about that blockade you mentioned before.”