I was twelve when I made my first kill, it’s a memory I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was a cold morning on our planet, ice frosted over the scant grass in the main battleground as I stood across from a young colt my age, a knife gripped tightly in my mouth as I prepared for what would either be the start of my life or the end of it. In the end, we spent more time staring at each other than actually fighting. Six seconds, and it was over. I cradled my peer’s body when we impacted, hearing him gasp for air as my knife buried itself in his lungs. Crying, I twisted. His body shuddered, a plaintive cry unable to escape him as his body tired and dropped, his eyes staring helplessly at me from the ground where he died. This was the ritual: the first kill. It was required of every future operative in the Program, and it defined the rest of my life. I still remember those eyes, and the hollowness that crept into them as I pulled my knife from his chest. I remember how badly I wanted to puke, tasting the copper over his blood around the handle as I snapped to attention in front of the King. I could not show weakness there. Any hesitation, and you died, either by your opponent or the King’s guards. It was the rule drilled into me by my father in my most formative years. Standing there, in front of the King as he smiled, and announced my victory, proclaiming me worthy of the Program. I felt no relief in his words. It was all I could do to keep my attention on the King, instead of the downcast look on my father’s face as he stood next to his fellow Roses in the King’s box.
My name is Atreyu Solanaceae, codename “Nightshade”. I was the daughter of a high ranking operative in the King’s Garden, the EPLA ruler’s hoofpicked cadre of agents dedicated to performing tasks deemed impossible by other ponies. In my youth, I was afforded luxuries the other members of the EPLA could only dream of, but the cost was a lifetime of service, determined at birth and raised over us as a sword.
The first years of the Program were the most dangerous, back when my twin and I were too inexperienced to know better. Survival was our only rule. We were educated to be useful resources to the pretender king, and then pitted against our peers in lethal combat. The Program had no room for the weak. When we came of age, we were inducted. We spent years growing up through a constant state of paranoia, learning our potions from Gran, while fending off our classmates in the off-hours. We learned our trade during the day, studying electronics, weapons, spycraft, how to kill, how to survive, how to function as sleepers and how to disguise ourselves. At night, we applied it.
Bodies turned up in strange places in the mornings. Classmates dwindled as we killed each other, sneaking in the dark. My sister and I became inseparable as we learned to rely on each other for survival. We slept in shifts, ever watchful for our classmates blades while we plotted their own assassinations. We observed, we learned, we grew, and by the end of our training, we survived. We were two of eight ponies left standing, the forty-two losers, all dead.
Father…father wanted a different life for us. He was a product of the same Program, one of the highest ranking members of the Roses, but through a flaw in his indoctrination, he broke free of his conditioning. I adored him. Father represented everything I had ever wanted, acclaim, wealth, power, notoriety. We didn’t know at the time, that the moment we were inducted into the program was the moment he decided to go rogue. Dad lived a double life, killing allies in the field and dressing it up as accidents, before finally separating altogether, and hunting his peers from the shadows. In what little contact we had with him once he started his ploy, he began breaking our training. He taught us doubt. He planted seeds in us to question the King’s authority, and when we were finally taken away, he began his real work.
We only saw him once after that. Our training continued for years until graduation, having satisfied the mandatory requirements of our charge and selected our specialization, guided by our talents. Mine was tracking and subterfuge, spywork and assassination, all guided by my talent of divination. With my talent I could divine what a target would do, how they would act, where they might go, and if I followed my instincts, if I performed the right actions, if I acquired the right intel, then I could always kill the mark. But I did not work alone. My sister became my partner in murder. Aetra’s talent was poison, disguise, and deception, a masterful actress aided by a natural immunity to poisons lethal to most ponies. By herself she could draw out a target into the open, unwary of the danger they were in. She could bend mares and stallions around her hoof and lead them like sheep to the slaughter. Together we were unstoppable. It was by graduation, however, that our father had been found out.
The video had turned up, that damnable thing; father’s treason caught on camera for all to see. His was our first official assignment as graduates of the Program. A succession kill, both to establish our names within the Garden and to prove our loyalty to the King. We obeyed. It was what we were trained to do, after all. We tracked our father down to a warehouse on a planet close to the Rim’s capital and confronted him. We argued. He tried to get through to us, hopeful that his ploy had worked, but in the end, we were little more than mindless tools. I earned my name that night, taken by right from my father's corpse when I put a bullet through his head. That was my turning point. Though I wouldn’t know it until years later.
Father’s teachings stayed with me, even as my sister and I continued to advance. We became known as ‘The Twins’, completing our assignments with cold, unrelenting efficiency. We also had the misfortune of being pretty. The King noticed us and took us as concubines, both as a reward for our accomplishments and to satisfy his own lusts. We became Roses. I became a traitor.
I had enough, one night, stinking of sex in the king’s bedchambers. I wanted him dead for the things he made us do. I wanted the pretender king to pay, but deep down, my desire to survive was stronger. I defected instead. I used my skills to disappear, and took as much of EPSOG’s intelligence with me as I could. No one saw me leave, but they did notice my absence and the list of disasters that began to plague their operations. But I knew that all my work would be nothing more than a nuisance by itself. No pony can fight a war by themselves, after all.
In my years in hiding, I used Gran’s potions to change me. I made allies, built networks, adopted a new identity, all for the purpose of bringing down the Garden around Basalt’s ears. Then, one day, amidst all my scheming, I met an idiot in trouble. It would have been easy to just walk away, but the pull from my talent was particularly strong that day. So I made a choice. The rest, is history.