Soft Step chuckled as she watched her prey squirm in front of her. The fear on their faces looked so delicious that she wanted to gnaw it off with her razor sharp fangs. Even though she’d snuffed their lights to shroud the cave in His darkness, she could make out every single hair of their coats in perfect detail. The raw power given to her by Him, entrusted in her by Him, had turned even the mundane into something spectacular.
“You thought you would be safe until the next full moon, didn’t you?” she asked them while her mummies patiently waited for the space to clear before climbing onto the rocks. “You thought you knew exactly how this works. I’m sorry I had to shatter those expectations, but I simply won’t wait that long to bring Him into the world. The longer I wait, the longer the Pretender has to realize all is not as secure in her domain as she would like to believe.”
“Soft Step! Soft Step, don’t do this,” one of the stallions pleaded with her. The corrupted alicorn’s slit eyes fell on an older earth pony huddled against the stone, but mustering the courage to try and stand up to her. “We’re your friends. Whatever that spirit did to you, you have to fight it!”
“Silence!” Soft Step boomed, her augmented voice shaking the stones of the cave and forcing her quarry to cower away from her. “I will hear nothing more out of you. The mare you thought you knew is dead. She was weak and fractured. My Lord put her back together into something more fitting for his purposes. No matter how much you wish to will it otherwise, Soft Step will never come back to you… Ratchet.”
Soft Step winced at the stallion’s name. Despite her claims to the contrary, some poor sniveling wreck of a mare tried to pound on her skull from within, to force her to stand down. But that pathetic thing was too weak to move her limbs away from serving His desires. He had given her strength beyond measure, and with that strength, she was determined to squash what little was left of the pegasus she once was.
“If you’re going to kill us, get it over with,” the other earth pony growled. Soft Step frowned at him; he wasn’t familiar like the other three, whom she had all known from a past life. “I knew it was going to end this way sooner or later, and I’d prefer to get this shit over with if I’m just going to die anyway.”
“Shut up!” One of the unicorns, Ruse, hissed at him. “There’s still a chance we’ll—!”
“What?” Soft Step asked, prowling closer to him. “That you’ll survive? I wouldn’t bet on that. That would be… very unlikely.”
“I don’t see why you’re waiting,” the other unicorn said. “Unless you like to hear the sound of your own voice. I never would have thought you had something so dark hiding deep down inside of you, Soft. Perhaps I missed something on your mental health examinations.”
Soft Step opened her mouth to harshly rebuke him, but closed it after a second’s thought. These four ponies were just stalling for time, and here she was, taunting them and humoring their responses. Her Lord didn’t have time to wait for her to play this game all night. Growling, she whipped her head to the side and pointed down the hallway. “Take them to the middle chamber. If they fight, break their legs. Rip them off if you must. I only need their hearts.” Her eyes narrowed on the four ponies as bands of deep darkness shrouded their heads and covered their eyes. “At least go to meet your deaths with some dignity. Don’t make me break you apart piece by piece until you still die anyway. I used to think highly of you—most of you—before my Lord lifted me even higher. Allow me to honor a dead mare’s legacy in some way by making your sacrifice clean and painless.”
The four ponies writhed as her blindfolds covered their faces and her loyal soldiers began to drag them to their hooves. Ratchet wrestled away from them, almost falling into the water Soft Step stood on, and tilted his head up in her general direction. “Soft Step, you can fight it. I know you can. You’re strong, stronger than some long-dead shade of a moon spirit!”
“I am tired of listening to you,” Soft Step said, and a muzzle made of shadow locked itself around Ratchet’s snout. “I will remove your tongue if I have to. Now go.”
The mummies grabbed Ratchet and dragged him away from the water, forcing him down the hall after the other three. Soft Step followed them, ducking her head to not scrape her horn on the low ceiling, and smiled with glee as His plans came together. Now that the mortals had done all the hard work for him, all she needed to do was finish the ritual—a ritual that would end her own life as well.
The little green mare inside her skull screamed in panic. Soft Step put a hoof on her and squeezed until she fell silent. All that mattered was bringing Him to this wretched, ungrateful planet. If He willed it, she would be reborn in the shroud of His glory. If not, then to die for Him was the best use of her life, and she couldn’t be happier.
Her thralls pushed the prisoners through the gaps in the collapsed rock filling the hallway, though Soft Step reduced it to gravel with a thought and a flare of her horn. Beyond that lay the shrine that had first sealed away these islands so long ago and had prevented Him from extending his influence beyond a narrow little patch of the sea. With her help, the barrier would be lowered tonight and the ritual would be completed.
“I have to thank you on behalf of my Lord for recovering all the figurines,” she said as she walked around the perimeter of the room, lifting up the unicorn figurine carved in His likeness and admiring it. “If it wasn’t for you opening his tomb, we never would have gotten this far. And all your hard work has brought them here, exactly where He needs them to be. You’ve done Him a wonderful service without even realizing it.”
She set the unicorn back down on its pedestal and moved closer to the dais in the center of the room. Her mummies had thrown the four stallions to the far corners of the room, split up so they couldn’t communicate with each other, and under the guard of at least three pairs of lifeless eyes each. Sighing, she sat down on the dais and crossed her legs, letting her feathers run over the islands carved into its surface. “I have two unicorns and two earth ponies. All I need are two pegasi now, and I can finish this all off for good. So, I’m going to ask you, Ratchet…”
Hopping off of the dais, Soft Step advanced on the older stallion and knelt down in front of him. His muzzle disappeared, freeing his tongue, and her magic shifted the blindfold over his eyes so he could see her. She parted her lips to reveal her fanged maw as she leaned in, forcing the stallion to recoil from her. “Where are they?”