XXXVI
A Leg Up
XXXVI
A Leg Up
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m an alcoholic, so I wish to clarify for non-habitual travelers that at least at the time of these events, an inn or hostel which did not also offer an attached bar or tavern was the exception, and not the rule.
In Platinum’s Landing, the establishment in question was simply called ‘the Canteen’. It was a fairly nice place, all things considered. To fight the oppressive swampy humidity, the wall behind the bar was only shoulder high, offering a beautiful view out toward the east and, in theory, a rising sun—had we been the kind of ponies who drank at dawn.
It was weird seeing all my traveling companions and rivals gathered in one place, instead of split up across the countryside. Graargh, Angel, Blizzard, Tempest, Silhouette, and Hare, all sat around a table (somehow) waiting for me to finish a decidedly pleasant glass of pure rainwater midway through my story. Only Gale’s presence was missing, but I felt it every time I glanced to the empty seat opposite me at the far side of the long table.
I sighed, set down my solid wooden tankard, and nodded to the group. “... so I picked up a tree and tried to crush the candlecorn with it.”
“You use a tree as a club, Mister Wizard?” Hare asked. “Wouldn’t that be awful heavy?”
Tempest chuckled nervously, though from the way he watched me from the corner of his eye, it was obvious he still hadn’t quite gotten over my discussions with Solemn Vow. “You should see what he can do to a brick wall. Did you get him?”
“No, he tossed a spell at me and then teleported away.”
“Why?” Graargh asked. “Old ghost pony is very magic, yes?”
I chuckled at the phrasing choice; not bad at all for Graargh’s slowly developing vocabulary. “Not when he’s dead. I think I need to explain this, so everypony please pay attention.”
“Bear!” Graargh roared.
“Yes, and would that include every golem as well, or shall I depart for a moment?”
The table released a dull thud from the impact of my face. “Please… everyone pay attention, okay? Now, basic magical anatomy. Magic energy is called mana. Souls are made of mana, and they exist in a space that’s parallel—” I glanced at Graargh. “That means ‘side-by-side’, with ours. The same way that the body eats food to get energy, the soul feeds on bonds with other souls, like love and friendship and intense personal hatred.”
“And ego, I assume? That explains a lot,” Silhouette muttered, glancing at me wryly out of the corner of her eye.
I chose to ignore the soldier as I continued. “Obviously, though, just having a ton of friends doesn’t make you a better wizard, and that’s because there’s another aspect to it. Just like you have to train yourself to eat a lot of food by exercising and working and building up an appetite, your soul can only ‘eat’ so much friendship and or love or unbridled hatred at a time. And ‘eating’ more is the only way for your soul to produce more magic for your body. A wizard’s soul, like mine or Wintershimmer’s or, I don’t know, Star Swirl or Clover the Clever or whoever—that soul is going to be able to produce a great deal of mana. Here’s the trick, though: unless you can take that mana from the soul and move it over into a physical living body, all the mana in the world is useless.”
“So Wintershimmer moved his soul into the… you said they were called ‘candlecorns’?” Blizzard asked, fanning herself with a wing to deal with the still-alien humidity. “Why would he need to hurt the other ponies then?”
“Because there’s a risk in having your soul attached to a body that firmly. Specifically, it is very risky if a body dies while a soul is attached. At that point… Perhaps I should demonstrate. Angel, please come here.”
“Master Coil, if I may, I’m not certain I like the sound of that request…”
I rolled my eyes and gestured again with my hoof, waving him closer. “Have I ever hurt you before?”
“As you are so fond of reminding me, Master, I am a stone. However, I do recall at least three separate occasions where you stubbed your hoof or bruised a shin in the attempt, sir. As for emotionally, let me count the ways. There was…”
“Not right now, thank you.” Eyes around the table gave me a variety of concerned looks, to which I shrugged. “Wintershimmer had certain ‘opinions’ about how you treat a golem… Anyway, look here.” I set my tankard on the table, and lit my horn with a glow so minor I barely even felt the strain of the day’s continuous tax on my mana. “Just relax, Angel; this is trivial magic, and it won’t take more than…”
Angel’s body abruptly fell from hovering in the air, shaking the table with the impact of a fairly dense stone and two golden rings that spun like discarded coins. The innkeep of The Canteen looked over at us with a disapproving raised brow, and then went back to the business of running his inn.
“What did you do?” Blizzard asked, leaning forward in obvious concern. “Did you just rip out his soul?”
“Nothing so violent; remember, I’m the one who tied it to the rock in the first place. Angel’s fine.” I cast my gaze down at the table. “Aren’t you, Angel?”
“Well, I quite admit that I’m not a fan of these accommodations,” answered my tankard. Hare jumped back in surprise, and even Graargh tensed, but most of the near-adults at the table simply raised a brow or cocked their heads.
“What I’ve just performed is called a ‘binding’ - it’s the third and final cantrip of the school of necromancy.” Blizzard raised a wing like a foal learning the alphabet, and I jumped to the obvious answer. “A cantrip is a basic spell; sort of a building block. You construct more complicated spells by combining and modifying the twenty-one cantrips. But all that is beside the point; what matters here is something important. Right now, if I smashed this tankard, it would literally destroy Angel.”
“Sir?!” my mug-bound golem gasped.
“I don’t understand how that’s any different than killing a pony,” Silhouette grumbled. “Same thing. You just destroy the body.”
“I was referring to his soul.” That got Silhouette’s eyes widened. “When a pony is born, their soul is bound to their body in a natural way that no necromancer in all of history has ever been able to replicate. When we die in our natural bodies, our souls escape; usually, they’re drawn off to judgement by the Sisters, or whatever… I still need to ask Celestia about that in more detail…” I shook away the distraction. “But when I artificially bind a soul, my magic doesn’t know to go away when the body dies. The trauma passes on to the soul. If the wound is minor and surgical like a slit throat or a knife to the heart, the soul will probably be left trapped, immobile in a dysfunctional body, unless somepony animates it into a zombie or something. But if the body is destroyed completely, the soul is destroyed with it. We call that ‘dispersing’ a soul. In a very literal sense, that pony ceases to exist. I can, to a certain extent, ‘raise the dead’ by making corpses walk and putting souls into them. But once a soul is dispersed, even Celestia and Luna can’t change that.”
“And how does this whole ‘binding’ lesson fit in with Wintershimmer?” Tempest asked, before lifting a frothy mug of ale to his muzzle; he’d been nursing the thing since my story began, yet it was still nearly full. “He took a lot more souls than he has candlecorns.”
“He’s probably bound multiple souls to each candlecorn.”
Silhouette cocked her head at me in confusion. “So they’re schizophrenic?”
“Firstly, I’m surprised you know that word, Silhouette.” Her curiosity collapsed into a glare. “Secondly, no. None of those souls is actually controlling the candlecorn. Wintershimmer probably has direct control somehow. But binding so many souls gives him two advantages.”
“Hostages?” Silhouette proposed.
I nodded. “Obviously, we can’t destroy any of the candlecorns as long as innocent souls are still bound to them. As for the second advantage, it’s magic.”
“Whole thing magic,” Graargh observed. “All you say is magic, magic, magic. Not understand!”
I coughed into my hoof. “I mean magical energy. Mana. Wintershimmer is using those souls to give the candlecorns power. That’s also why he left their bodies alive. Once the original body that goes with a soul is gone, the soul will no longer pull magic into the living world.”
Silhouette rolled her neck, producing a surprising array of geologic noises. “Okay, so that all explains why Wintershimmer would be getting magic from the ponies he foalnapped, and why he kept them all alive in the swamp, but I still don’t see how he’s controlling the candlecorns if he’s dead.”
“There is another way to let a soul control a body. One which doesn’t risk being dispersed if the host body dies.” I lit my horn again for another trivial charm. This time, out of my tankard of pure water emerged a swirling cloud of mostly transparent gas and light, which slowly took on the form of Angel—which is to say, a rock and two golden halos.
“Magic?!” Graargh turned to me. “Bad magic?”
“It’s the rock, kid. Calm down.” Silhouette patted the tiny bear cub on the back, which didn’t seem to cheer him any, but did visibly restrain him from attacking the loose soul.
“Master Coil, may I return to my body now?”
“Not quite yet, Angel, though I promise it won’t be long. Now, I need a volunteer.”
The table fell deathly silent. Silhouette and Tempest, both military ponies, had the foresight to slide their chairs backward. A moment later, Graargh followed suit.
“Blizzard, would you be so kind?”
She glanced around the table nervously. “You aren’t going to… take out my soul or anything, are you?”
“I’m not going to cast any magic on you at all, I promise. I just need you to relax, close your eyes, and go out of your way not to move for a minute or so.”
Blizzard glanced around the table for some sign of support, and then hesitantly nodded. “Alright… if you’re sure this is safe.”
I nodded my affirmation, then turned to the ‘ghost’ of my own golem. “Angel, I assume you know what I’m demonstrating.”
“Of course.” Turning toward Blizzard, the golem’s ghostly form floated slowly forward. “I promise, Miss Blizzard, that I will show your body the utmost respect.”
“Is that how you like it in the bedroom?” Silhouette whispered to me, her brow raised. “Certainly explains the way you taught the rock to speak to you.”
I had the wisdom to ignore the taunt; I certainly didn’t threaten Silhouette’s life or state of memberment in public.
After the moment of pronounced, threat-free silence between myself and my former nemesis turned grudging-ally, I turned back toward Blizzard. She smiled at me like a pony who had never before possessed the muscles necessary to offer such an expression. “Master Coil,” she said, her tone formal but her voice still decidedly feminine. “Have I exhibited what you were hoping to get across?”
“You have, Angel. Thank you both. Angel, hop back in your body.”
Angel emerged from Blizzard’s chest, and the grown mare abruptly started running her hooves and wings over her chest and face, as if worried Angel had wandered off with some physical part of her. “The disorientation is normal, Blizzard, but it will pass in a minute or so, I promise. What you all just witnessed was a possession: a soul assuming control of a physical body without being bound into it. Angel was able to control Blizzard’s body. However, I promise you that if Blizzard had been trying, she could have resisted him, and even pushed him out. Obviously, Angel isn’t a terribly powerful necromancer.”
Angel’s body reassembled itself and floated up off of the table top. “Could you perhaps bind me again, Master Coil?”
Silhouette chuckled, winking in my direction. “I had no idea you taught him to be so forward.”
I gritted my teeth and ignored her. I probably would have waved off Angel as well if he hadn’t picked up. “Possessing my own body, rather than actually being attached to it, is a somewhat unwelcome experience.”
“I don’t have the mana for that tonight, Angel. I’ll take care of it once I have the mana, though.” I turned back to my small audience. “Angel would have been able to move Blizzard’s body around even if she were asleep or unconscious. If, Celestia forbid, one of us had killed Blizzard while Angel was possessing her, he would still have been able to control the body… at least, to the extent that the body still functioned.”
“So Wintershimmer is using the other ponies to give him magic?” Blizzard asked, still sounding nervous. “Rather than risk his own life, he uses their magic and just possesses the golem?”
“Precisely. And unlike with Angel and Blizzard, I’m afraid even a hundred magically untrained ponies would ever be able to overpower Wintershimmer’s control of the body. Rather than brute willpower, he’s able to use his magic to guarantee control. And that’s where it gets hard for us.”
“It doesn’t have to be us,” Tempest observed. “I could go back to Everfree. We could have a legion here in less than a week.”
“Yes, Tempest, brilliant idea.” I groaned. “Instead of some peasants from a swamp in the middle of nowhere, we should give him an army of pegasi trained in using their magic for war.”
Tempest placed both his hooves on the table, pushing himself up over me. “So you’d rather ask for a serial killer’s help?”
“If he can actually save lives, I wouldn’t care if it were the draconequus himself!” Despite my snarl, all the eyes at the table gave me blank stares. “The draconequus? The most powerful evil spirit in equine history?” As blank stares continued, I pushed myself back from the table and collapsed into a slouch on my wooden chair, the wood groaning beneath me. “I don’t expect you to understand, Tempest, but this is exactly the situation where we need wizards, and not an army. If we had enough time to wait, I’d send you to go and get Star Swirl the Bearded. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to wait. Who knows what Wintershimmer will do with those ponies if we don’t stop him as soon as we can. And I’m the only pony who can get those souls away from him.”
Silhouette rolled her eyes. “Didn’t you just, not three hours ago, tell Wintershimmer that he was right about all your hero bullshit?”
“I’m not planning on being a hero, Silhouette. I’m being practical. We need somepony who can free bound souls. That somepony also has to be able to not have their own soul ripped out by Wintershimmer while doing it. And, would you look at that, we’ve arrived at a list of ‘just me’.” With that, I stood up from the table.
“So given that we don’t have any other options about who’s going to be the ‘hero’ here, Silhouette, I’d say that all philosophical discussion of that point can be filed next to Wintershimmer’s morality and Jade’s sanity. I’m probably going to die tomorrow, so please feel free not to wake me up if I sleep in.”
I groaned, rolled over, and pulled the hay-stuffed bag that served as my pillow across my face. “I asked for one thing.”
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize that the horizontal line I drew just above this text represented a full nine hours of evening and morning in the sweaty, swampy environs of Equestria’s least delightful city.
“Him is here!” Graargh announced, his volume justified by the entirely generous inch he elected to place between my exposed ear and his lips. “Come quick, Morty! Winnershimmer is here!”
Somewhere between the inky oceans of dreamless sleep and the roiling surf of hatred and desperation, there exists a lonely atoll of apathy. Standing atop that metaphorical sand, I sat bolt upright and proclaimed, in the fullness of my heroism and courage, “Oh. Really? I was expecting to have to hunt him down in the swamps...”
“Hurry! We fight!” Tiny bear jaws tugged at my already horribly ripped and mudstained sleeve.
I yawned and swung my legs off of my bed. “No, Graargh, we already discussed this. Silhouette and I are going to—”
“Him not alone! Have many rock pony. Many tree pony.”
“I…” It took me far too many seconds to parse that thought as I stood up and found my balance. “Golems? That doesn’t seem like his style...” I scooped my head underneath the bear cub, rolling him down my neck and onto my shoulders, before breaking into a sprint. Down a rough wooden hallway notable only for its incredible lack of decoration, we sped out through an open doorway and into the common room—giving me just enough time to see a table in my way and dash across it, before arriving at the front door of the inn.
Outside, I saw a storm.
Tragically, the above claim is poetic license; were the threat to Platinum’s Landing to take the form of inclement weather, the two dozen pegasi I immediately found in the streets would have made short work of it. Instead, their foes were more corporeal in nature and more magical in threat: towering golems of stone and mud and cypress wood and stinking tar molded together into the shapes of ponies easily ten feet tall at the shoulder. At least five of the false creatures were standing in the streets, facelessly doing battle with Equestria’s finest.
“Master Coil!” Angel came hurtling toward me, spinning in his halos in obvious perturbment.
“Where is Wintershimmer?” I asked, casting my glance around. For all the golems, their waxy master was nowhere to be seen.
“I’ve not seen him, sir. I followed Tempest and Blizzard; I tried to warn them concerning what Master Wintershimmer—”
“You don’t need to respect him anymore.”
“Ah yes, sir. I do forget. As I was saying, ‘—what that inequine abomination could do to them.’ But they didn’t heed me.”
“Right…” I glanced down. “Graargh, if you want, you can get big and help these ponies, but don’t let yourself get hurt. If you start to get tired, I want you to run back up to the room and hide. Understand?”
“Graargh stay with Morty!”
“I…” I sighed. “Fine. Get big, stay close, let me do the talking. And shout if your neck gets cold.”
Graargh roared quite deeply as green flames engulfed him. I would have been worried about the guardsponies panicking at the sight, but giant golems trying to kill you tend to make for an engrossing distraction.
“Angel, get me to Tempest.”
My golem started to fly into the besieged city. “I very much doubt he will listen to you, Master Coil. He was still very cross—”
“He will. Do you know where Silhouette is?”
“No, Master Coil; the city’s guard captain gave her command of a small team of the city’s soldiers, on Tempest’s recommendation.”
“This city has a guard captain?” I scoffed.
“Er, yes, actually; you convinced him you were quite handsome when our boat docked.”
I winced as I ran, and opened my eyes just in time to see a hoof thrown at me by a titanic pony lunging out of an alleyway it barely fit into. I fell onto my side, sliding under the attack. Behind me, Graargh leapt forward on powerful ursine legs, wrapping his foreclaws around the creature’s neck as the momentum of it’s punch slammed into the building on the opposite side of the street. With a fury I can gratefully say that I had never seen before, Graargh tore into the thing’s neck, ripping off pieces of peat and sticks and stones that together probably equalled my body mass. The golem spasmed and rolled, trying to dislodge the adult grizzly on its back, shortly before my shapeshifting friend managed to claw so hard that he outright decapitated the golem.
I found some minor amusement in the way Graargh’s eyes widened when it kept fighting him.
“Just let it be!” I shouted as Graargh hopped back with all the finesse and dexterity his form provided, knocking over a rain barrel and scattering more than a few loose bricks as he avoided a swipe from the headless creature. “We’ve got to go!”
The lumbering headless form lurched after us as Graargh and I sprinted away, led through the battle-laden streets by Angel’s glimmering disks. All around me, more of the golems fought tiny battles, their mud and brambles spilled over the streets as they fought rather impotently against the guardsponies of Platinum’s Landing.
Why had Wintershimmer even bothered? Though the golems were big and distracting, they weren’t terribly threatening. More to the point, they drew an enormous amount of attention to an existence that only Silhouette and I had otherwise witnessed. Perhaps the distraction was the point… but for what greater plan?
“Where did the golems come from, Angel? Up out of the swamp?”
“I do not know, Master Coil; you will have to ask Tempest or Captain Century.”
The rest of the sprint through the streets was uneventful for us, even if our surroundings were laden with battle; the city guard were keeping the majority of the golems occupied, and those few that had yet to settle into an engagement proved too slow to catch us. I did note with some small concern, though, that the golems all turned to watch me as I ran, tracking me with their eyeless faces and their expressionless muzzles.
Platinum’s Landing didn’t have a single open space that I would call a ‘town square’, but the oblong space preserved in front of a cathedral to Celestia seemed to serve the same purpose. There, no fewer than two dozen soldiers were engaged in a more fierce battle with at least a half dozen of Wintershimmer’s creations, holding a line in front of the sturdy stone edifice. Overhead, Tempest darted here and there, carried on favorable winds almost certainly of his own creation. The sword in his teeth tore the golems, but they cared little for shed mud and broken stones.
“Tempest!”
“Morty?” The stallion flared his wings to slow, spiraled as he turned, and landed in front of me at no insignificant speed. When he finally stopped, his sword was unpleasantly close to my throat, though he quickly sheathed it. “What are you doing back here? And where’s Silhouette?”
“Back? I haven’t…” I swallowed hard. “That is extremely bad.”
“I am not understand,” the huge bear growled. “What happened?”
Tempest’s eyes swung around the clearing before returning to me. “That wasn’t you? Is that magic? Can magic turn you into other ponies?”
I nodded. “That’s what made Star Swirl famous. But if ‘I’ didn’t use any magic when you saw me, Wintershimmer was probably just using a basic glamour. Any wizard worth their salt can cast it. Where did he and Silhouette go?”
Tempest gestured off with his wing. “Silhouette went that way first; you, or I guess Wintershimmer, followed after we spoke.”
“Well, it’s good he didn’t decide to kill you outright. I wonder why; you’ve got strong magic. Maybe he just doesn’t care, and thinks you’re some random soldier.”
“You won’t hear me complaining,” Tempest added with a jaded grin, his scruffy chin fluttering just a bit from the chuckle he released. “Now, help us out with these giant mud things and then we can go find Wintershimmer.”
“Not a good idea.” I shook my head. “I can probably stop him from ripping out your soul, but he has a lot of other ways of killing somepony quickly with magic.”
Tempest nodded, turned toward another of the soldiers in the square, and wordlessly gestured with a wing. Without turning to face me, he picked up. “I can at least help you find him; like you said, he didn’t seem to care about me.”
“I’m not about to take that risk. Graargh will help you with the golems.”
My little companion, the enormous grizzly, loomed forward. “Stay with Morty!”
“Graargh, look at me.” I swallowed nervously as ursine eyes focused on me. “I need you to understand, this isn’t something you can help me with.”
“Not care!” Graargh shouted. “Not leave behind!”
“You’re not leaving me behind, Graargh. I’m the one—”
Ursine paws wrapped around me, threatening to crush my ribs. “No! Family not leave me! Family not leave Graargh!”
“Graargh, I’m not planning on dying! I’ll be back!”
“Promise!” he demanded.
“I promise! Now please, let me go!”
The loss of tension from the full sized bear led to a string of wheezing breaths. I might have stayed there in the middle of the street, if it weren’t for the pitched battle between Tempest’s squad of the city guard and a trio of oversized masses of vaguely equine mud and swamp foliage. At some point in my near-death hugging experience, Tempest himself had rejoined the battle. I shouted to the armored young stallion.
“Tempest! Clear me a path, and I’ll cut them off at the source!”
“That’s great,” Tempest shouted over his shoulder. “But they aren’t dying. We can tear them apart, but they sort of—” His words stopped briefly when a literal tree trunk swung through the air at his side. Folding his wings fully against his side, Tempest dropped out of the sky, letting the log slice over his head before regaining his hover. “—put themselves back together. I think we need magic.”
“Um…” I scratched my temple. “Can any of your ponies do fire magic, like Cyclone?”
Tempest nodded. “Nopony nearly that strong, but we do have a few fire empaths.”
“It shouldn’t take much. Pitch and tar burn easily.”
Tempest gestured around with a wing, raising a brow incredulously. Just a moment later, he lunged aside as another of the golems’ slow clumsy blows attempted to turn him into a thin paste. “It’s a wooden city, Morty.”
“And you’re a bunch of pegasi, Take whoever isn’t making fire and go get rain clouds or something. Or have Blizzard do her ice magic on them once they stop moving. Whatever you have to do. I need to find Wintershimmer. Angel, stay close.”
“Close and quiet, just as you always request in combat. I’ll be here, Master Coil.”
“Good. Graargh… Help Tempest with that one on the right.”
Graargh grinned. “I nom.”
I waited for my opening deliberately, watching as swords and tree limbs and claws and fangs danced at the far side of the boardwalk street. While Graargh was something of a blunt instrument, I had to admire Tempest’s strategy. When our ursine ally tore out one of the golem’s knees, Tempest landed straight in front of the magical monster, slashing furiously in front of its face. With only three legs to stand on, and Tempest hopping backwards from each of its blows, the golem had to lunge forward, sliding on its belly to try and hit the nimble pegasus. Tempest easily dodged by launching into the air, then severed his enemy’s other foreleg before it could stand back up. Laying flat on its chin, the golem wasn’t nearly enough of a threat to keep me from running past. Graargh followed for a few steps, but I shook my head. “Stay with Tempest, Graargh.”
“You promise,” Graargh answered, and then he was quiet for a very long moment as I turned my back. Only as I was just on the precipice of earshot did I hear him cry out.
“Love Morty.”
Silhouette and I stood back to back against a mass of golems, which was pointedly odd given that I was able to stand some twenty feet away and watch them both from around the corner of a building. Wintershimmer’s illusion was excellent, capturing the focused but youthful line of my jaw and the mage’s focus in my piercing blue eyes with focused detail. If I’m being honest, the handsome stallion was just a touch distracting. He gave me too much credit, though, in my fashion; no matter how utterly attuned I might be to fine taste, even I can’t keep a jacket free of scratches and blemishes in a months-long trip on hoof across the known world. In fact, just looking down at my own real foreleg, I could see stitching from a loose branch or rough terrain that was absent on my illusory counterpart’s apparel.
“Alright, Angel, here’s the plan. You’re going to fly over to Wintershimmer, and you’re going to tell him Tempest needs their help or something. Mostly, I just need you floating next to him. I’m going to try and rip out as many of the souls he has stolen as I can using his spell, and put them in your rings where we normally store my mana.”
“Can you bind so many ponies, Master Coil? I thought you only had a few spells…”
“Not binding them; that would be a separate spell for each, and we know he has more than three ponies’ souls trapped. I’m just going to break his bindings to the candlecorn body all in one go, and then let the souls sort of float over to you. You’re going to need to calm them, explain what’s going on, and fly away like you have never flown before. Ideally all at once. Break line of sight so Wintershimmer can’t physically attack you, and then just get lost as fast as you possibly can. Go to Graargh, and when I’m done I’ll find you to put those ponies back.”
“Graargh? Not Miss Blizzard, or…”
“How well do you think Wintershimmer can impersonate Graargh, Angel?”
“…I suppose I see your point. If I may ask, Master Coil, why not rip out Wintershimmer’s soul and leave the other ponies in the candlecorn body?”
“I don’t know how he got into the candlecorn from the Summer Lands in the first place, so I can’t guarantee he won’t just pop back in. Once you’re gone, I’ll try and figure that out.” I glanced around the corner, watching as Silhouette slid under a towering pony, punching into its mucky chest as she avoided its lumbering blow. ‘Morty’ lit his horn and hurled a frankly boring impersonation of an arcane missile made of an insignificant amount of mana. The golem he struck crumpled to the ground, ‘destroyed’.
“Alright… Angel, go.”
To my own self-aware nervousness, the plan began by working perfectly. I built up a powerful glow around my horn, ready to deliberately flare up in a ‘smash-and-grab’ sort of extraction of Wintershimmer’s victims. Angel darted out into the street where Silhouette and Wintershimmer were working together. Silhouette glanced over at the golem, but caught no obvious sight of me. Even Wintershimmer, though somewhat surprised at Angel’s arrival, didn’t appear to have found any concern or any need for a heightened guard at the arrival of the utterly non-threatening flying rock.
“Master Coil!” Angel shouted. “Please, you must come quickly. Tempest needs your help—”
Those two and a half short sentences bought me all the time I needed to step out onto the street and lower my horn. A burst of my blue magic didn’t form a visible beam or a bolt or anything of the sort, but from the shocked and shuddering expression I witnessed on my own face across the way, I knew my blow had landed true.
Angel started screaming, in roughly six tones of voice. That, in particular, I found highly disconcerting, especially combined with the wave of exhaustion I felt sweep through my body from the powerful spell.
Silhouette whirled away from a golem she had decapitated and toward the strange noise. “Morty? What—”
“He’s Wintershimmer!” I shouted, shaking my head and glancing up at myself.
Silhouette’s expression hardened, looking between me and my more cleanly dressed counterpart, then took two swings at Wintershimmer. He jumped back nimbly, and then when she stepped forward again, teleported back about twenty feet with a pop.
In the course of her attack, I ran up to her side. “I just… got a bunch of the souls out. Maybe all of them…” I panted at the exertion of my spell, and forced my eyes to focus on my mentor. His face shifted in front of me, swirling like powdery snow caught in a gale.
Silhouette rushed again at the now visibly waxy, though not yet recognizable figure. With surprising agility for a wizard who I had never before seen need to dodge a spell or blow by physically jumping, the candlecorn flung itself backward far further than any mortal could jump without the aid of magic. He landed with enough momentum that his hooves skidded on the wooden board streets of Platinum’s Landing, scraping off globs of his waxy form in the grain of the wood as he went.
“Here we are at last, Coil.” My mentor, now distinctly wearing a wax version of his distinctly skull-like face, rolled his neck. “Are you prepared to die?”
“I’ll give you a chance to give up, Wintershimmer.” I lifted my head if only for posture, and paced forward. “You’ve lost your source of mana beyond what you already have stored up in that golem, and I still have two spells left. Right now, I’m stronger than you are.”
Wintershimmer shook his head in disappointment. “Star Swirl is stronger than I have ever been. Brute force did not make me the greatest duelist in a thousand years. Will you flee now? Teleport away now that you’ve proven the hero and saved those ‘poor’ peasants?”
I stood defiantly, glaring at him. “Is that your best bait? I taught your candlecorns to trace teleportation. I’d just be out a spell for no benefit.”
“Tragic, putting so much work into a project and having it turn against you. Perhaps you’ve gained a shred of sympathy for me?”
Silhouette glanced over to me with a raised brow like something about the sentence confused her, but I was too busy responding to Wintershimmer to pay it much mind.
“You don’t deserve any sympathy. Attacking innocent ponies with an army of golems only made you more obvious. Even if you kill me, what happens when the Butcher comes after you? Or the Sisters?”
“If you’ve thought to ask that question but you do not know the answer, you have already lost.” Wintershimmer punctuated the finality of his statement by lighting his horn. I felt a chill on my neck, and surged another spell without hesitation. Wintershimmer’s grip on my soul broke as my magic saturated the air, leaving a tingling across my coat. Only a moment too late I felt the cost in the drain in my legs and shoulders.
Wintershimmer smiled, but he didn’t need to say a word.
I elected to fill the silence. “Silhouette, I’ve… He can’t rip out your soul as long as we stay here. Not for a few minutes anyway. I’m only good for one more spell; you might need to take it from here. You can use the amulet to fight him.”
Silhouette smiled at that. “Letting me finish Wintershimmer off?” Her hoof moved up to her neck, and she wound the cord that held the black stone in a tight loop around her forelock. “How very generous of you, Morty.”
“I’m not afraid of an earth pony mare,” Wintershimmer observed, surprisingly genuinely. I wondered if he had a genuine plan, if he was bluffing, or if he was simply too arrogant to recognize his own defeat.
The answer arrived swiftly.
When Silhouette charged, Wintershimmer turned his dribbling horn downward, and fired a spell at the ground. I watched globs of wax drip down his temples, looking to all the world like the sweat of magical exertion as his once great magical reserves stuttered to whatever little supply he had left within the golem’s body. Still, he was strong enough to pick up the wooden beams of the street in Platinum’s landing, turning them into a wall that stopped Silhouette in her tracks, and more importantly, cut off our vision of the old stallion.
“Silhouette, wait!” I shouted, only to realize her momentum wasn’t simply going to stop easily. I say this with certainty because instead of going over or around the wooden planks, Silhouette lowered her shoulder and bull-rushed straight through them in a cloud of splinters, glimmering crystal, and pure, unadulterated badass.
I had shouted in fear for my unexpected ally because of an old wizard’s dueling trick that Wintershimmer was employing. A pony would break line-of-sight with their opponent through a wall or opaque shield, and then teleport to a position where they could strike their enemy, who would be busy trying to overcome the initial defense.
It was thus to my surprise when Wintershimmer was still just standing there on the other side of the wall, his waxy face just waiting for Silhouette’s oncoming hoof. The squelch of wax was satisfying, but I felt myself growing worried. If Wintershimmer had enough mana to make that wall in the first place, he could have just as easily teleported away to gather his strength.
“How’s that taste, old stallion?”
With his mouth smeared into a dozen splotches spread across his neck and the surrounding street, Wintershimmer was in no place to reply. Silhouette chuckled, and rammed the hoof carrying her void crystal straight into his chest.
The result was almost immediate. I caught sight of a visible bubbling and popping of the body, and then it simply collapsed into a puddle of half-molten wax. Silhouette hopped back toward me, flicking her legs out in all directions one at a time, in hopes that the sticky material would fly free of her crystalline coat and her black leather bracers.
“Alright, Morty, we—”
I felt a sudden lurch of the street beneath my hooves; presumably the same that caused Silhouette to lose her thought mid-sentence. Then came the cracking, the thunderous parting of boards like ribs. I jumped when the wood below me splintered, and watched in horror as it parted into a gaping drop to the bog water some twenty feet below.
I barely had time to start screaming. Silhouette spared the need to even shout anything. She pivoted in place on pure instinct, leapt into the air on athletic legs, and tackled into my side. The force carried us both to the edge of the yawning pit, with my body tumbling onto solid wood, and her chest scraping on the broken edge as her hind legs dangled over the side.
“Morty!”
“Silhouette! Crap!” I flung myself at her in turn, hoping to return the favor, and wrapped my forelegs around her shoulders to pull her up.
Something below us pulled down. Silhouette screamed, right next to my ear, in deserved pain and an admirable lack of fear. “Pull!”
“I am!” I hissed in agony as she slipped, and for a moment, I felt a lurch as her shoulders slipped. Quickly, I brought my forelegs together tighter, and I managed to catch her by a single one of her forelegs: the one tightly bound to her void crystal amulet. The magic-eating gem sucked at my skin, and I hissed my teeth at the burn and the drain. Already down two spells, my vision swam and my ears rang.
“I think I’ve…” she hissed through gritted teeth. With a huff of breath, she kicked with her hind legs, but I didn’t feel her meet any resistance. “Wintershimmer was there!”
“What? Of course it’s Wintershimmer!” I snapped at her. “Pull!”
Silhouette’s leg strained in the effort of lifting her body, and slowly, her shoulder rose above the level of the street. As she fought to climb, she spoke through gritted teeth. “What he said! ‘A project turn against you.’ Remember—”
A flash of sickly golden magic beside Silhouette’s head blinded me for a moment, and I blinked at the dots in my eyes.
The weight I felt got lighter, but I still felt myself holding Silhouette’s hoof between mine, and the burn of the void crystal tied around her fetlock. I tugged her up over the lip.
And then I heard her scream of pain.
“Morty!”
Distant, and falling.
“Silhouette!”
I dropped her foreleg on the boards beside me… and only then realized that was all I held. It ended in a clean but bleeding slice, nearly up to her shoulder, and well out of the way of the protection her amulet would have offered.
I leaned forward, into the hole in the street looking down into the darkness below the raised city. The murky water rippled, and a few small bubbles rose as the only signs of Silhouette’s falling.
I narrowed my eyes, watching for some sign of Wintershimmer or Silhouette, but nothing moved. The swamp was as still as the grave.
It took a moment for the weight to hit me. The grief and guilt followed soon after. I was the wizard. I was the one who knew Wintershimmer’s tricks, or at least the way he thought. I knew magic, and the way his mind honed itself toward the singular conquest of his enemies.
I should have known better.
Had I been given a minute more, I might have found tears for the mare I had until so recently considered my oldest enemy. But I never found time for those tears.
Behind me, I heard a pop and smelled a hiss of ozone. Teleportation. As I turned, Silhouette chuckled.
“Had you fallen for her, Coil? She certainly seems to have fallen for you.”
The voice was Silhouette’s, but I knew the speaker better. Wintershimmer made Silhouette’s face smile, even as she bled from the stump of her shoulder. Though my enemy was approaching, I quickly scanned my surroundings. Somewhere, Wintershimmer had another candlecorn or some sort of unicorn help. Silhouette’s body couldn’t have teleported itself.
“Wintershimmer.” I lit my horn, careful not to let it flare and send me into what would surely prove a fatal nap. I needed time to watch for his magic. A taunt was my best option. “Was that what this was all about? You wanted to be a younger mare?”
“Spare me your so-called wit, Coil.” I’d heard a great deal of bile from that tongue, but it was strange hearing Wintershimmer’s harsh, almost over-enunciated unicorn dialect in the normally Crystal-accented soldier’s voice. “I needed to save her. You were right that I needed those souls from the swamp for mana. Silhouette is the first step to replacing what you took from me. I only bring her here to return her to you.” Silhouette’s face smiled, and even let out a small chuckle. “You could kill her, and I would no longer draw her magic. That would weaken me considerably. But I know you won’t. That isn’t what a ‘hero’ would do.”
“I’ll save her,” I told him defiantly, though only in retrospect do I realize how much I must have been playing the part of the petulant foal. “I’ll kill you!”
“Disperse me?” Wintershimmer shook Silhouette’s head. “An amusing fantasy, Coil, but we do not live in a fairy tale. You were expecting my soul to appear when you destroyed that candlecorn, weren’t you? You lack the skill to even find me, much less defeat me.”
“For the pony pointing out that we don’t live in a fairy tale, you’ve gone awfully far out of your way to gloat at me about how incredibly powerful you are. Pride goeth before the fall.”
Wintershimmer snorted in disdain. “Look in a mirror, ‘hero’.” Silhouette’s mouth twisted into a slight grin, and then abruptly fell slack as she collapsed to the street.
A painful thought entered my mind as I nervously searched around the street for any remaining threat, and then struggled to pick up Silhouette’s remains. For all the times in the Union that I had called her an extortionist or a villain or a thug, the pit in the street Wintershimmer had opened wasn’t aimed at her. Silhouette was dead because she’d saved my life.
Silhouette was the hero.
What did that make me?