Fluttershy let loose a bolt from her crossbow.
To her relief, it pierced the spine of the skeleton advancing towards her. The magically animated lump of bones fell to the ground, to be trampled by a shambling horde of its brethren. Her hooves fumbled to load another bolt into the device. Doing so, she fired again to destroy yet another skeleton.
Her breaths were coming quicker to her now. Her face was twisted into a mask of rage that she had never felt before as she cut down the advancing hordes of the undead. Beside her, Glory swept his stone arms to and fro, destroying clumps of skeletons with each blow.
Her heart exploded with excitement and then she wondered why she enjoyed the act so much. Shouldn’t she, as the element of kindness, despise this act of killing? A thousand justifications came to her and she put them aside as she sniped another skeleton through the skull.
The horde was advancing at a quicker pace than she could have ever imagined. Ever since she had acquired Glory as a companion, the skeletons had assaulted the two in numbers she had never imagined possible. Entire graveyards of skeletons had molested the two as they journeyed from the Everfree forest and now that they were well on their way to Canterlot, the skeletal hordes had become a massive threat to her quest.
Canterlot. The name shone in her mind like a beacon of hope. Within Canterlot was the portal between this world and the next that was fabled to be able to retrieve a single soul, if a stone of resurrection was used with the intent to retrieve that specific soul.
But before she could access that magical device, she had to fight an entire army first.
Their white, glistening numbers streamed like an avalanche of bone across the bridge which Fluttershy was desperate to cross. Their forms glowed with pulses of magical energy that created a bonfire of unholy light wherever they clumped up into groups. She silenced the tumult in her mind as she fired again and again, her body growing weary from the process of aiming, firing and reloading the crossbow at her side. Glory’s blows were growing slowly slower, each one somewhat less powerful as he threw himself into groups of skeletons and devastated all that challenged him.
She surveyed the carnage that surrounded her. All around were scattered the skulls of unicorns, their gnarled, boney horns cracked, chipped and broken into shreds. Torn banners from the skeletal army were present as well. Most of them had been rendered into illegible chunks of cloth by Glory’s blows, but some of them still possessed the same symbol that reminded Fluttershy so much of Twilight’s cutie mark.
Fluttershy then looked to the giant, his stone back to her. Without him, she realized, this task would have been forsaken long ago. She looked in her saddlebags to the dull glow of the magical crystal within and though she didn’t have a moment to spare from the skeleton slaughter, she smiled inwardly. Memories of her and Twilight filled her mind and her passion to fight blossomed anew. She knew that as long as she fought, as long as she remained angry and determined, then Twilight still had a chance at living once more.
Fluttershy paused as the waves of skeletons seemed to have let up for a moment and all was still. She took advantage of the fleeting moment of peace to survey her surroundings. A bridge stretching over a chasm so deep that the bottom melted away into blackness was before her, covered in shattered bones. On its sides and railings were many orange pumpkins flickering with purple candlelight. Their knife-carved faces were a mixture of leering smiles and brooding frowns. On her side of the bridge was the forest the two had just emerged from. Past the edge of the bridge stretched the road that would take them to Canterlot.
A skeleton riding across the bridge on a unicycle suddenly entered her view. It wore a conductor’s hat tilted at an angle atop its head and tooted on a long golden trumpet. The sheer oddity of the unicycler caught her gaze and as she stared at it, an object shot from the end of the trumpet and whizzed over her ears. She jumped to the side and fired a bolt at the blowgunner, whiffing the shot.
Her teeth mashed together. Focusing her gaze, she prepared to fire. Before she could get another shot off, a sudden force struck her from behind. She was thrown to the ground with a meaty thump that knocked the breath out of her.
The skeletal bird’s talons began to dig into her side, sending waves of fire through her body. She shrieked and smacked the bones of the beast and several of them flew away, but it still continued to rend her flesh. Her hooves pounded uselessly against the ribcage of the undead beast.
I can’t fight it.
Fluttershy’s rage grew....
I can’t…
Fight back...
And then exploded. She sent the skull of the bird rocketing away with a titanic kick.
The bleeding pegasus rolled over and spat out a mouthful of shattered bone, thankfully not her own. As she lay on the ground and panted, masses of bone flew overhead, flung from the destruction which Glory had wrought against the skeletons.
After several moments, there was silence. She continued to lay on the ground, putting a foreleg over her eyes and sighing deeply. The pain was beginning to dig deeper into her body from her wounds and deeper than that was the emotional pain that twisted its way into her mind. It was the pain of having been forced to kill, even against beasts as surreal and evil as the skeleton army. It was the pain of physical and emotional weakness in the face of the death of her friend.
The only thing which lifted that burden from her mind and allowed her to breathe were her thoughts of being with Twilight once more. It was her anger, her white-hot rage that would allow her to save her friend. She tried so hard to suppress her thoughts of sympathy towards the broken skeletons around her. Despite her strongest efforts, a strand of empathy worked its way through her mind and she shuddered at the scope of the skeletal holocaust around her, sending a brief prayer of thanks that there was no meat on the bones of the skeletons to make the scene even more ghastly.
She began the process of clambering to her hooves. Before she could summon the strength to stand, a rough hand helped her up..
She softly gave thanks to Glory. “Of course, little one.” Glory put his index finger and thumb to his chin in a thoughtful gesture. “Now, from where did this threat emerge?”
Fluttershy looked up to his head, which eclipsed the setting sun. Her words caught in her throat as she beheld the giant. Streams of sunlight gushed from behind his head in a halo. His gem-eyes sparkled as they caught the light. The sensation of looking at him felt to Fluttershy like beholding an old statue in a museum of a time long past.
Words finally filled her mouth. “They...well, everypony turned into them.”
“Was it a magical disease of some sort? An evil sorcerer’s spell?” inquired Glory.
Fluttershy shook her head. “No, the cause is unknown, even to me. Ponies and everything else began to…” She struggled to find an adjective to describe the horror which had befallen Equestria. “Wither. Everything which didn’t die turned into an evil skeleton.”
A rumbling came from within Glory’s stone body. Fluttershy realized it was a sigh soon after. “Why was I not activated sooner?”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” said Fluttershy. “It came so quickly that nopony had time to react.”
Glory nodded in understanding and then pointed to the sky. “As for the sun?”
Fluttershy looked to the ground. “I...don’t know. Perhaps Celestia herself…” She fought to maintain her composure. “Maybe she died.”
“It is a tragedy.” muttered Glory in a low voice.
“Tragedy?...” Fluttershy shut her eyes shut and tried to hold back the flood. Tried and failed, as it was. “TRAGEDY?”
It felt as if a lightbulb had been shattered inside her head. “Do you really think you can talk about ‘tragedy’ when you’ve never experienced something like this before?” Her mane hung about her in flattened strands as she spoke, her lips curling up to reveal her teeth. Her brow was so furrowed in anger that she could barely see through her narrowed eyes.
Glory stood motionless and watched the little pony before him writhe in fits of anger. Before long she simmered down and panted, out of breath from her ranting.
She muttered an apology to Glory and turned away from him. He uttered no words but simply turned around and began to stare at the sun with his arms crossed.
His moment of contemplation was broken by footsteps that shook the ground. Both Glory and Fluttershy looked around themselves frantically as the mysterious approached and at once it came into the clearing.
The gargantuan skeleton was not a pathetic, yellowed ruin like the other ones that had assaulted them along the bridge. Its bones were white, some of them still running red with gore. In its hand was a sword almost as long as its body and many times longer than either Fluttershy or Glory. A golden crown sat atop its head and Fluttershy gasped when she saw its shield. The icon upon it looked too similar to Twilight’s cutie mark to possibly be anything but the mare’s mark. She raised her crossbow to fire. A single bolt struck the shield in its exact center and shattered against the hardened wood therein.
It grinned at them, not that it could do anything else. Fluttershy braced for a counterattack that never came.
Sheathing its sword for a moment, it waved its massive skeletal fingers at her, waggling them for the sake of the greeting. Then without speaking, it pointed a white, bony finger at Glory and beckoned him to come forwards with a twitch of its index finger. Glory lowered his head and marched forwards to face the beast with solemnity infecting his every step and gesture as he approached the towering entity. As he approached, the skeletal king unsheathed its sword and pointed it towards Glory.
Fluttershy took a moment to begin treating her injuries with bandages from her bag. When she had wrapped the first wound, the king finally spoke to Glory in a booming voice. “My old enemy...here at last, to die.”
“My old enemy, the king of death.” Glory pounded his stone chest. “I will destroy you here, now and forever.”
Fluttershy remembered the words from the fairy tale in a moment of spontaneous recollection. No matter where Glory went, the king of death would appear to hinder him on whatever quest he was on to help the ponies of Equestria. The king of death did not restrict himself to a single form; if it was a story of a dragon and a princess, he would be the dragon. If it was a story of a colt and a giant, he would be the giant.
So it was fitting in Fluttershy’s nightmare of skeletons that the king of death would appear to Glory as a skeletal king.
She also remembered that when Glory arose to fight in his eternal duel with the king of death, the protagonist would often be left to his or her own devices for the rest of the story to reveal some theme or motif about their true self, stripped of the protection which the giant provided. More often than not however, Glory would return to help the hero with some final task, though not in every tale.
Resigning herself to her fate, Fluttershy trudged across the bridge as the fight raged on behind her.