“That’s it, Joe.” Archive was bloody, weary, and broken. She had healed so many wounds that she no longer had the magic left to spare. She had seen so many ponies die that she couldn’t abide the pain anymore. She wanted to lie down on the stone of Mundi and give up. Charybdis would sweep over them and consume all that she loved, but at least she could rest. “That’s it.”
Joseph’s workshop used the same design it had back in ancient Alexandria—a university closer to its original namesake in time than it was to them now. So many years we’ve fought. But for how much longer?
Magic coursed through the room, invigorating Alex against her will. She wanted to fall asleep and die, but even her Alicorn magical reserves were quickly filled by the spire. There were so few ponies alive anymore that there was more than enough magic to go around.
Every few moments, there was another terrible crash, the whole city shaking as Charybdis ordered more of its creatures to smash against it. Every time they did, the magic weakened. All but the inner city had been consumed now, the rest was nothing but corpses and the minions of the unmade.
The wreckage of crystalline tech was scattered around the worktable, along with notes and old books. Some of it looked recently destroyed. She could also hear breathing coming from the back of the room, where Joseph’s never-used bed was tucked away beside so much other refuse. A lump was curled up there, covered by the blanket. Joseph himself lay on the ground, his body such pure crystal he was mostly transparent. She could easily see the wall through him—except for something he was wearing. Dark metal around his neck, something he hadn’t been wearing before. Joseph was not one for wearing jewelry.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, his voice distant. He didn’t look towards her when he spoke, though his eyes were open. Transparent and glowing, sightless. Joseph could not see the physical world anymore—he saw only the Patterns of things. A mage sight spell that never ended. “We have so many Alicorns. We have immortals, we have demigods. Send them out to fight.”
“Not as many as we did.” Archive began walking towards him, eyeing the new object he was wearing. “Only three of the Alicorns recovered their sanity. Sunset and Oracle are both dead, Joe. And I don’t know if I’ll make it another battle.”
“They’ll be back,” Joe said, apparently unmoved. “Just wait.”
“Not in time,” Alex argued, clearing another few feet. Raw magic roiled in the air around him, enough that the flesh of ordinary creatures might’ve been ripped from their bones. Alex’s own vision split into the Supernal the closer she got, as Joseph’s view of creation imposed itself on her. It was a terrifying thing—every object seemed so fragile, so mutable. She could see the desperate ponies of Mundi through the walls of the lab, barely a dozen symbols each. Frail, weak, insubstantial. Only the two of them were different.
Joseph’s whole body was made from spells, an ever-flowing sea of subroutines and functions, ever-changing. And Alex—Alex was a window, through which the eyes of a thousand-thousand dead looked out in judgement.
“Then send the Dreamknife,” Joseph said, clutching the object around his neck. “She’s good at killing things. Have her kill the army.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Alex admitted. “After Ezri…” She whimpered, reaching to wipe away the tears at her eye. They’d already evaporated by the time her hoof got there. “She dumped Isaac at my hooves and didn’t look back. But she couldn’t kill Charybdis on her own, even if she had stayed.”
She was right beside him now. Alex lowered her head, dropping down. “Isaac has gone to bring Enceladus, but I don’t know if he will arrive in time. It may be decades before the Wayfinders arrive. The Keeper said she would keep your shield going if she could, but I know it can’t be much longer. Her power is tied to the living, like mine. I know she can’t have much left.”
“Sounds like we lost then,” Joe said, pulling away from her. He covered his face with one leg, but it did him no good. His legs were as transparent as his eyelids. “We’re out of immortals, out of time. It was a good run.”
Alex remembered looking down at this unicorn, when she had been a frightened little earth pony in a world that seemed to mock their attempts at survival. When Joseph had been playing video games on his fancy gaming PC, when he had refused to go outside and help with whatever magic his horn could provide. He had changed so little in all those years.
“No,” she said, her voice taking on a little of that patient, ancient self. “You promised me a weapon, Joseph. Your masterwork, remember? You’ve been working on it for thousands of years. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect, Joe. It’s time.”
It seemed her words had finally struck a nerve—Joe tensed, curling up and away from her, clutching the object about his neck tighter. “It doesn’t work! It’s a failure Alex! Everything failed! That bastard knew, that’s why he killed Cloudy first! All my notes, all my research. I was so close to bringing her back, and he took her away! He’s burned everything I love, and I couldn’t do it!” He pointed back at the other end of the room with one hoof, towards the bed. “Go and see, Alex! See your weapon in action!” He laughed, his voice rising to mad cackling.
Archive could only imagine the fear her lieutenants must be feeling, waiting in the hall as they were.
“Alright,” she said, rising to her hooves, and walking away from him. Joseph kept laughing, one of his hooves smacking over and over against the crystal floor.
Alex’s coat stood on end as she crossed the room, and the stench of decay filled her nose. She bit back a gag, mostly at the taste of the magic against her horn. Necromancy.
In her many years, Archive had put down more than a few necromancers. The terrible magic was not inherently corrupting, as the gifts of Charybdis and the Void. But Equestrian books passed down from another world had made it clear that the left-handed path led to the void, one hoofstep at a time. The dead must be left to their own.
And yet, how often had Archive called on them? Just not like this.
Alex levitated the sheet out of the way, and the bile rose again in her throat. What she saw before her was an abomination, far worse than she had imagined. Her limbs started to shake, and her eyes filled with tears, faster than they could be burned away.
What curled before her was as though a pony had been imperfectly reconstructed, then had random bits and pieces of it rotted away and replaced with chunks of glowing crystal and wires.
Her cutie mark was intact, though, a pair of gray clouds. One of the soft brown eyes was rotten, but the other was intact, filled with an agony that no words could express. She tried anyway, a rasping gasp from the creature’s throat that oozed something gray from every opening.
Archive recognized Cloudy Skies—both of them. One was her ancient friend, dead after her long life. The other, Joseph’s construct, spawned from the HPI’s technology and his own magical research. They had not combined well.
She would’ve instantly destroyed such abominations, but now she hesitated. In Joseph’s lab, even simple spells could get out of control. It would take enormous discipline to channel an unmaking spell powerful enough to undo necromancy without also unmaking half the building.
“Joseph Kimball.” She turned away from her old friend, who was still reaching out with a half-rotten hoof. She didn’t let her get close enough. “You will tell me what you have done. This is not the weapon you promised!”
Maybe it was her anger that had given him the strength to rise. Maybe it was simple madness. “Isn’t it, Alex? I told you there had to be a way to fight Charybdis—this was my genius. I’ve only been looking for Death’s cure for thousands of years! It’s been my only goal since I saw past the outside curtain and knew it could be done!” More mad laughter. “Charybdis’s legions swelled as he conquered because so many would rather swear their lives than let him torture and kill them!”
He shoved past one of his workbenches. His body was so charged with magic that the touch turned it all to ash, but he didn’t seem to care. “We have more dead than the enemy! Billions and billions of them! I was going to give you all of them, all the way back to those ancient primitives you used to tell stories about! You could keep them all… all but her.”
“It failed,” Alex said, moving out of Joseph’s way as he stormed over to the abomination he had created. “You can’t bring them back, Joe. What the Supernal takes, it never returns.”
His cackles of madness filled the room. “You sound just like Equestria’s dead books. But their wisdom didn’t do much for Equestria, did they? Their Alicorns died like ours!” He still held to the object around his neck with one hoof. Alex could see it a little clearer now—it looked like a gigantic key, made of something that was only somewhat solid.
She gasped as she recognized what she was looking at—Mordite. The Death-Metal, quarried from empty rockets on the outermost edges of the solar system. It caused instant death to any living creatures it touched. Even extremely diffuse alloys could cut through spells like they were mist. Somehow Joseph, a living spell himself, held the key against his body. The key looked as though its metal was constantly shifting and melting—but always it remained the same shape.
“I could’ve done it if I had her!” Joseph roared. “I needed Cloudy Skies! Her mind was the key! She knows them. But I couldn’t. No one could! She’s dead, they’re all dead. Monsters, like me. The Supernal hoards all its wealth.”
“Give it to me.” Alex put out a hoof towards him, towards the artifact that was the culmination of his near-endless life’s work. Obsessive genius on the scale of something that Earth had never seen again. It’s still necromancy. Even if it does work.
Joseph pulled back, lashing out at her with a silent spell powerful enough to atomize her body a dozen times over. A few thousand years ago, it would have—but her reaction times were faster now, and Joe wasn’t really trying to kill her. She tore the spell apart with a counterspell he had taught her, channeling the energy back into the spire. The whole building shook again, humming with pale green light. “No! I won’t let you take her away again! The last time I trusted anything I loved to you, Charybdis took it away! Everything you touch dies!”
Alex advanced on him, heedless of the danger. “Joe,” she whispered, very quietly. “I know how much you cared about Sky. But this isn’t her.” She gestured at the suffering monstrosity on his bed. “You’ve done enough, Joe. Let me finish it.”
He shook his head, though some of the fire vanished from his eyes. More suspicion. “I know how you feel about necromancy. You’re just going to take her away! You’re like Equestria, backwards and stupid!”
She let a few bad arguments die unspoken in her mouth. The building shook again to another of Charybdis’s attacks. She reached up, putting one hoof on his shoulder. “Not today, Joe. I’m going to fix it. What you started. You’ve gone a little crazy over the years, let your fantasies and your realities get twisted up inside. You can’t call a pony back who never lived.” She tapped the side of her head with her free hoof. “Joe… I remember them. I remember all of them. I promise I won’t send them away.”
He looked back, transparent eyes as guileless as a child. He looked like he might’ve cried, except that his body couldn’t cry anymore. That capacity was long gone. “I wanted to save them, Alex,” he said, looking down. “I told you I could… I wanted to do it for you. For them. For everyone.”
“I know.” she hugged him. Her coat touched briefly against the heavy metallic weight. She prepared a shield, but it wasn’t necessary. As she had suspected, the Key did not try to kill her. Joseph had tamed the Mordite somehow, turned it towards the most powerful necromancy ever performed. “You did your best. We all did… and it was never enough.” She let go of him. “We have to try anyway, Joe. That spell of yours… that’s our last chance. Isaac won’t be here in time, the immortals are all gone, Charybdis still has too many.”
Joe hesitated, glancing between her and the creature behind her. Then he removed the necklace, levitating the chain onto her hoof. “I don’t know if anyone can,” he said. “I planned… planned on having Cloudy. She wasn’t supposed to die… in Midgard… I think he knew.”
“He probably did,” Alex agreed, lifting the chain around her own neck. It glowed, each link made of a different metal. Archive settled it against herself. It was as strange as first growing a horn had been—a new magical sense, one she had no context to understand. Rather, one any other pony wouldn’t have had the context to understand.
But Archive had died more than anypony else alive—she had seen beyond the veil so many times it wasn’t so strange to be standing halfway across it now. Death had left a permanent mark on her mane, even today.
They Key was trying to kill her, though whatever magic Joseph had set into the chain contained it for now. Yet she could still hear its voice, struggling against its bonds. Peace waits for you, weary traveler, it spoke into her mind. You can’t win. No one can. The rot swallows all things. Yet if you free me, we can defy Death itself. She looked up, and saw the abomination very differently than she had a few moments before.
It wasn’t rot and decay, it was two twisting, conflicting patterns, assembled at random in an explosion of insane magic. Some of its parts were completely constructed—bits of nopony at all that Joseph had willed into existence to form the pony that was his impossible ideal.
Alex made her way to the cot, where the horrible creature suffered. She could release it from its pain, as she longed to do for herself. But she ignored its whispers, reaching out towards the creatures Joseph had made trying to call back a pony from beyond death.
“I’m sorry,” Alex whispered. “Nobody ought to do this. The Keeper will probably never speak to me again.” She closed her eyes, touching the pony’s cheek. “I remember you,” she said. She banished Joseph’s fumbling with barely a thought, and chunks of crystal thumped onto the ground one after another. A few sparked as they came down, falling out of Sky’s body.
To say the pegasus “healed” would not be quite right, since the undead could not ever heal. But the body mended—color returned to her cheeks, missing organs grew. Cloudy Skies returned to apparent life, as Alex had always seen her in the moments of her own greatest difficulty.
How many times had this illusion been there to give her the drive to keep going? Wearing the Key around her neck, Alex could see she was only halfway here—more a creature of magic than she was one of flesh. But she didn’t look like the other undead she had ever seen before. There was a spark here, a touch of the Supernal trapped in left-handed magic.
“You… Cloudy!” Joseph shoved past her, putting one crystal hoof on one of Cloudy’s wings. As though checking to see if she were real. “You’re alive!”
The pegasus let him touch her, met one of his hooves with some tenderness, then punched him in the face. It made a sound like glass dropping on stone, but he didn’t crack. Whatever Joe was made from, it was too strong for that these days.
“I can’t believe you would leave me like that,” she said, before turning to one side and hacking. She coughed, and what seemed like lungfuls of bloody slime spilled onto the ground, smelling as much of rot as Cloudy herself had, a few minutes before. “You should’ve killed me. Tried again. Anything.” She rose to her hooves, shivering all over. “Ever there to save the day, Alex? Guess you owed me after all those times I rescued you.”
Joseph only watched, apparently unaffected by the violence.
Alex shrugged. “I wouldn’t have done this,” she spoke quietly, as though afraid that too much volume might make the pegasus disappear. “I know you wouldn’t—”
“Approve?” Cloudy Skies shook out her wings, stretching both in turn. “No, obviously. I’m dead. I don’t belong here anymore. But I already know what you’re going to tell me.” She flicked her tail up towards the ceiling, right as the room shook with another of Charybdis’s terrible attacks. “It’s the end of the world. Everyone is dying. And you’ve completely lost your mind—you think you’re going to beat Charybdis with an army of the dead.”
“Not you,” Joe squeaked. “You don’t have to fight, Cloudy.”
She glared at him. “Joe, shouldn’t you know what’s out there? I only came to fight. Alex needs me.”
“No she doesn’t…” Joe argued. “You can’t help it… it’s the key she’s wearing. You do what she says because she’s controlling the…”
“No.” Cloudy Skies cut him off. “I’m going to help because that’s why I’m here in the first place.”
Archive gripped the Key about her neck as Joseph had done. She could feel its strange magic even now, struggling to contain the artifact that wanted desperately to kill her. Not just her, but every living thing in the fort. So much Mordite was enough to kill a great many people.
But she wouldn’t let it. She would need as many soldiers as she could get, but it wasn’t soldiers she thought of first. Archive imagined her old friends, the first survivors of that ancient Event. Magic poured down from the spire above, keeping the artifact fizzing with energy as she reached out to those who had once been the closest to her.
It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was far better than what Joe had forced her to see. Alex didn’t remember them as imperfect fusions of others, and she knew how pony bodies worked better than Joe could. First came Oliver, not as he had been in old age, but in his prime, tall, and strong and handsome.
He blinked, momentarily dazed, but there was no moment where Archive had to flush away an imperfect casting. He would wake up correctly the first time. “Alex,” he said, tone a little tense. As it had been during their later meetings, neither one ever completely reconciled. “You’re… taller.”
“Yeah,” she said, ears flattening despite herself. “A little. It’s been awhile.”
“Now, kiss,” Sky said, from a few feet away.
They both turned to glare at her, though neither said anything to that.
“This is… a dangerous path you’ve chosen for yourself,” Oliver said, eyes taking in the lab and the Key and Joseph by one wall. Though whether he would be able to identify the unicorn was yet an unanswered question. “I considered this magic for treating the untreatable cases. It is not sustainable—the mind decays, the body refuses to repair. Requires surgical correction.”
“That won’t happen,” Joseph called, apparently having collected himself a little after being told off. “The mind thing, I mean. You’re not a zombie—your corpse has been dust for so long there would be nothing to bring back. You’re both wraiths, if you want to get technical about it. But so long as that key exists, all the damage you’re thinking about will be mitigated. You won’t need to feed on the living, or be dominated by animalistic lusts. I have turned the Stygian Key.”
“Damn,” Oliver said. “Is that you, Joe? You never got better, did you?”
Archive didn’t hear his response, because she wasn’t finished. There were others yet to call before she could reach her army. A unicorn grew up from the dust, like the others her coat a little faded, but otherwise intact. She had one difference from the original—her horn wasn’t broken.
Moriah looked around, taking in the others one at a time. Her eyes settled on Archive—no doubt drawn there by the power of the artifact. This key controlled the fates of everyone that it raised—without it, they could not exist. And if Joe said that she could use it to give them commands and expect them obeyed, he was probably right. Of course, she wouldn’t do that to her friends—bringing them back was abomination enough.
“You chose them first?” Moriah asked, glancing between Oliver and Sky. “I was wondering if you wanted my help at all.”
“Be grateful,” Sky said, her voice wistful. “That it was her instead of Joseph. All that crystal magic and he couldn’t find room in there for a better memory.”
“Wait.” Moriah turned, stalking back towards him. “You find out how to bring ponies back to life, and you started with her?”
Joe didn’t get a chance to answer before, for the second time, an undead mare smacked him in the face.
Alex imagined her firstborn son—and dismissed the spell as soon as she realized she was bringing him back as a colt instead of a stallion. Some things were too far even for her, even at the end of the world. She tried on Ezri, but this time the spell didn’t work at all. “Joseph—is there any reason I can call some but not others?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t get the chance to experiment before Midgard. I guess maybe they aren’t listening? This isn’t about zombies—zombies are basically what Charybdis does with that fungus he incubates in corpses. But if you can give a body back to its original owner, well… he loses troops.”
No Ezri, then. The magic similarly failed to reach Adrian, across the vast reaches of time. But Riley came when she called, as tall as she was, with a glittering black coat and shimmering multifaceted eyes. She was already armored as well, in something hammered from the indescribable black metal the queens worked in their secret forges. “Hey, Riley.”
The queen didn’t hesitate as Oliver had done, but instead leaned down to embrace her immediately. “This isn’t the way this was supposed to happen,” Riley said into her ear, though she didn’t hug her any less. “I’m still frozen, aren’t I?”
She nodded. “You are. But I need your help—I need everypony’s help.” The building shook around them, and it seemed with that strike like whole sections of distant stone were being ripped away. They were running out of time.
“We aren’t much of an army,” Riley said, looking around the room. “Looks more like you missed your friends.”
“I did,” Alex admitted. Maybe she wasn’t any better than Joseph—she’d done the exact same thing he had tried, only more competently. “I missed you all so much. I still think back to the years we were together—wished I had known then what I know now. None of you would be dead now if I did.”
“Reality’s a bitch,” Moriah said, though she was still eyeing Joe every few moments. “He’s still alive, though. So, one of you knew how to cheat death back then. I hope you plan to explain why you never shared that information, Joe. Maybe over wine when this is over?”
“When this is over?” he said, and he laughed. “This is the Last War. Oracle has seen the end—there won’t be anything left when this is over.”
Indeed he had, though it had not been specific enough to show things like this. It hadn’t shown individual battles, or the pieces that had moved on the board during those conflicts. Maybe he didn’t see Joe getting this invention working. Maybe the living and the dead fighting together are enough to win. It was a feeble hope, but it was something.
“It’s time to take the field,” Archive said, more for her own benefit. “We’re going to clear the outer gate and hold it. Force Charybdis to attack us instead of the fortress itself. Buy you time.”
“You can’t keep fighting forever,” Joe argued, watching as she walked away. “It won’t make a difference if Isaac doesn’t deliver.”
She shrugged. “If we must fight forever, then… I guess that’s what we’ll do. We’re already dead.”