A Thief's Tale: The Path To Penance

by Ringtael

Prologue

Garrison hopped over the rooftops with a well practiced ease, his skills having been hard fought and well founded in natural talent. He was born into his craft like no one before him, save for the mythical ones such as Goemon, Arsene or Robin Hood themselves. No, Garrison ‘Gauche Suede’ Varas was currently the best in the world at his craft, and my watchful eye was well aware of this while it’s quarry was not. The thief felt a prickle along the back of his neck as he hopped down from a rooftop onto a balcony, but he didn’t know where exactly to place the feeling. He knew something was up; his ‘sixth sense’, if you will, made his stomach clench and his canine teeth ache. It’s not like he was a Vampire, or even one of the lunatics in the silly Brotherhood of Alucard, but he did have a tendency to rip a throat or two out with his teeth when the situation called for it. The one time he’d been caught in his entire life, that dirty little trick had saved him, and ever since it had alerted him so some kind of impending threat.

It was not a feeling to be taken lightly.

The last time Garrison ignored his instincts, he was honeypotted by a buxom Scotswoman with fiery red hair and curvaceous hips for the promise of settling down and finding decent work as a locksmith (Having so much practice picking them gave him a certain understanding with them), and with such work in mind, Garrison had been stricken to find that Isla had been waiting for him to move in with her so she could set an ambush and take out the man who had robbed her father of a precious heirloom called The Eye of Horus; an artifact that had been entrusted to him by a league of assassins going by the name of Penance. The worst part of the situation was that Penance had hired Garrison multiple times over the years for non-lethal missions, and they were the ones who hired him to steal The Eye of Horus.

Sadly for Isla and her incompetent brothers, their ‘prey’ was on a different level of physicality, pure wit, and a certain savviness with escape scenarios that not of them stood a chance of catching him. It didn’t really help them at all that their plan of throwing a net on him failed completely when he walked through the front door backfired because he came in through the second story of their townhouse and heard them discussing their plan to kill him. It’d hurt beyond pain’s meaning in simple words that Isla, the woman he’d devoted his heart to for four years, was trying to kill him for a setup that he’d been unaware of until he heard her and her brothers talking. Garrison swore to Furladra, the God of Thieves, Travelers, Merchants, and Scribes, that he would amass more wealth and settle down on his own one day. He then swore to Amelemme, the Goddess of Love, Matrimony, and Healing, that he would stick his fist into her mythically all-engulfing quim and punch her womb.

Needless to to say, Garrion preferred to keep his dealings non-lethal, so he only threw four of his Joke Trochs down the stairs and waited for the idiots to walk into the caustic gas. Soon enough, the six siblings had to vacate the first floor of the house with four of them bolting outside and two of them, one of them being Isla and the other being her youngest brother at the age of fifteen, came straight into Garrison’s reach. Isla was shoved aside to be dealt with later while her brother, Patrick, was knocked out in one swift punch and was left on the stairwell, out of the Irritant Grenade’s range. Once he was settled, Garrison turned his attention to Isla who was crawling away while trying to catch her breath, but the deft kick into her side hindered her progress a little. Garrison was fresh out of pity, but he did have mercy, so the worst he did to her was slice off the bountiful waves and locks that had grown down to her waist.

That was the last time the master thief let his guard down, and it was because of love. After learning his lesson among many others that he’d seen others learn or experienced first-hand in his life, Garrison knew that he needed to get out of the public eye and into a safehouse as soon as possible, so he picked the lock of the door of the balcony and slipped inside to get the prying eyes off of him. Sneaking through the cramped tenement was less than child’s play, and getting down to the second story to continue his escapade was even easier. However, even as he snuck his way through the ramshackle structure, he felt as though he was being followed. The feeling was more than unpleasant. Rarely could anyone tail Garrison. Period. His ‘routes’ were unorthodox at best, and his usual speed made him hard to follow, so he was perplexed as to how someone was managing to keep up with him and even manage to manage to not be spotted by him any of the times he stopped and doubled back through a different route.

It was irritating him more and more to feel my gaze upon him, but I knew that it wasn’t in his best interest to meet me quite yet. No, I let Garrison do his running as I did my whispering, my little machinations sliding into place as he ran closer and closer to the most central point of the pitiful ley-lines in his world. Magic was all but nonexistent on Terra, but Garrison was one of my Chosen that were allowed to have a handful of the most valuable thing in the world. It had served him well as he used it passably, but when a flash of light stole Garrion Varas from his world, only I and a select few knew why he was gone.

✧❖☬❖✧ 0

Twilight rubbed her hands together in anticipation for her latest summoning. With her ridiculously large pool of Alicorn Magic bubbling and boiling for her to find a student to share her knowledge with, she could practically feel the excitement from the tips of her hooves to the very top of her head. The summoning circle had been double checked, quadruple checked, and then for fun, sextuple checked because Twilight had nothing better to do than to make sure that her experiment came out okay, and she was slightly immature enough to get a kick out of ‘sex’tuple. With her experiment put together in all the write ways, it was just down to Spike grabbing the right ingredients and they could be underway.

Spykoranuvellitar, or Spike for short, came down the stairs to Twilight basement slash laboratory post haste. “Alright Twilight, I got the manticore claw powder, the Poison Joke extract oil, the Alicorn of a rogue… Unicorn… Twilight, what do we need this stuff for again?” The teenage Drake asked carefully.

Twilight gave him a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Spike. Zecora only gets her supplies from willing ponies and the land, so don’t go and feel like we’re doing something we’re not supposed to be doing. Princ- Er, Celestia herself told me that we were sanctioned for the summoning since I have the authority for it now.”

“Right… Are you sure I can’t sit this one-”

“Don’t be a knuckle-dragger, Spike! This is for Magic’s sake!”

Spike looked at Twilight like she was crazy. “You realize that every time you say something like that, stuff starts going wrong, right? Like, there was the Want-It-Need-It spell, the whole Parasprite debacle the second time they came around, your solution to Trixie’s Magic duel when she grabbed the Half-Moon Mirror-”

Twilight flushed. “Hey! The last one was her fault!”

“It was your stripping spell that cost that poor mare her modesty, Twilight.”

“I didn’t know that the shield would scatter images and stick them to flat surfaces if you used a reactive spell instead of an active one!” She protested. “How was I supposed to know that Trixie was going au naturale at that!?”

Spike blushed at that one. “I don’t think anypony was expecting that.”

“Pervert.” Twilight nagged.

“I didn’t even look! How am I the pervert when you’re the one making ponies strip!?”

“You just are, so shush and put the reagents in the middle of the rune circle already.” Twilight huffed.

Spike rolled his eyes. “Score a million for younger siblings, score five for elder buttheads.”

“Do you really want to go there?” Twilight asked drolly.

Spike held the bowl of separated ingredients aloft in a single hand, smirking at Twilight. “Go first. I dare you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “... That’s not fair.”

“It’s totally fair. And since the dare was declared and you’re gonna forfeit because you’re not mean,” He held the bowl out to her, “you get to risk your own hide for once.”

His big sister gave him a dirty look as she took the bowl from him and stuck out her tongue. “Fartsniffer.”

“Buttmunch.”

They glared at each other for a few seconds before breaking out into mirthful little giggles and performing a special handshake that only they and Shining Armor, the former Captain of the Canterlot Guard and eldest sibling of the noble and honored Twilight Family, knew about. Even if two of the three siblings hadn’t been given royal titles, they still would have been members of one of the most prestigious families in Canterlot. As such, they followed a code of honor that wouldn’t allow them to renege on their word, though they sometimes needed practice on some of the finer details of behaving with nobility in mind. They took a far more casual approach to it than their older brother, but Twilight still accepted her loss with grace and just so happened to be the one who got stuck inside of the rune circle.

Twilight set the bowl down in the center of the circle, blissfully unaware of the fact that there had been leftover magic in the powdered Unicorn horn that sample that Spike had gotten from Zecora, though Spike saw the rune circle flare slightly and knew for a fact that Twilight was officially in deep waters without her floaties. He rushed forward, his words failing him in his panic, but the rune’s magic wall blocked his entry and deafened his cries of warning as he pounded against the translucent barrier.

The poor, unaware Alicorn turned and saw her young brother slamming his fists and shouting words she couldn’t hear, her blood turning to ice in her veins as she picked up the sensation of magic in its earliest stage. Twilight’s strength failed her as she came to the realization that casting any kind of spell would make her situation infinitely worse, and that doing more than staying still might get her killed. She was beyond scared. Fear was a distant memory. She sat and waited for her time to come, and when the growing warmth of the rune progressed to the point where she was beginning to feel her Magic evaporate as it passively tried to cool her, Twilight Sparkle fainted and Spike bore witness to a flash of light not unlike the one that had taken Garriosn Varas.

With the second piece of my puzzle in hand, I connected the two and set forth an event that was a long time coming.