"Hîe, dôð brêman of tend−ing rodor res. Ealdgeweorc mæðelcwide sîn bryne. ðanc setnes týnan wislic dôð n¯ænig heolor."
- Predictions and Prophecies, page 146, Old Equestrian Edition. Roughly translates as 'She, the herald of burning sky. The world will be fire. Life will end unless the scales balance.'
A cackling voice faded out of the all-encompassing darkness.
“Well! Hard Boiled, as I live and breathe. Most dead ponies have the decency to stay dead! Of course, I doubt anyone alive would call you a decent pony. Not if they knew what you’re really like under that do-gooder facade.”
I curled into a tighter ball, rear legs drawn up, face buried in my hooves. I wasn’t lying on anything per se, but neither was I simply floating in space; rather, in that way of dreams, I was doing both and it seemed perfectly fine.
Also, dreams being dreams, they are of nearly infinite perversity, because of all the people I could say I didn’t want to see just then, there was nopony higher on that list. The powers that be having the sick senses of humor they must, the only pony who’d show up to help me while away the hours in my nightmare was that one pony I’d have given anything just a few years ago to choke the life out of with my bare hooves.
Stained Glass.
The murdering rat bastard strolled out of the misty black emptiness surrounding me, his blood-soaked muzzle grinning just like he had the last time I’d seen him. His milky, dyed pelt and filthy blond mane were still drenched in what I knew, unquestionably, were my partner’s remains; it’s just how the universe works. He still wore the disgusting artist’s smock, flecked with gore, that he’d worn when he killed Juniper.
Trotting across the nothingness, he prodded me in the ribs with his hooftip.
“Oh come now, Detective! Catatonia doesn’t suit you! Up! Up, and talk with me!”
I swatted weakly at his leg, trying to will him out of existence.
‘It’s a dream. It’s a damn dream.’
“Yes! Yes, of course it is a dream. That is what is so magnificent about it. Now, shall we go somewhere a little more...ahem...homey?”
Immediately, the gagging stink of freshly spilt blood flooded my nose. Cold, metal grates pressed into my ribs, and the chilly air bit at my coat. I scrambled up, stumbling away as I found myself nose to nose with the severed head of a young griffin. Her eyes had been replaced with rubies and her upper body spread out into the general shape of a chair, with the back comprised of her wings, sewn together to form a rest.
We were back in the Weathervane.
Not, perhaps, the Weathervane as it was, but as I remembered it. The thick, humid air had me sweating like a pig in seconds. Even trying to breathe through my mouth, I could still smell the years of compacted death as though it’d been just yesterday I watched Juniper die.
‘Home-y’ he’d said. Maybe he was right. It’d haunted my dreams for years. I guess if one weighted a home by where you lay your head each night, then the Weathervane was undoubtedly mine.
Stained Glass trotted over to the griffin chair, turned, and sat back, spreading his bloody wings.
“Now we can talk,” he said, cheerily. A short table with two steaming teacups sat beside him. Picking up the one nearest, he took a careful sip, leaving a thin mustache of something too red to be tea. He swiped it away with his tongue and grinned. “Shall I pull you up another seat? I’m sure I have a couple of foals I’ve made into an ottoman at some point you could sit on. Of course, I doubt such a thing would shock you these days. You have left behind all the conventional horrors.”
“There was never anything conventional about you,” I growled.
He set his teacup back on its saucer and let out a carefully constructed sigh.
“True. I almost wish I’d been satisfied with murder, but death is such a quick thing. One moment a pony is on, the next they’re off. A switch that, once flipped, cannot be unflipped. Ah, well! So, tell me, Hard Boiled. Why are you here, rather than out there?”
I wanted to ignore the question and not give the creepy shmuck the pleasure of an answer, but my lips moved, whether I wanted them to or not.
“I don’t know. One minute I was about to open a vault to another dimension, then...then I was here,” I replied. “What do you want?”
“Me? Nothing much! Your very fine company!” He chuckled, picking a thin brush out of his smock and dipping it into the second teacup. Leaning down, he used the sticky tip to paint a dripping, red smile on the griffin’s face. “You may not believe this, but I admire you. You’d have made quite a savage killer, and the blood on your hooves is an ocean compared to the few dozen buckets on mine.”
“I kill ponies to save lives. I’m not a murderer,” I protested, though the words rang terribly hollow.
“Ha! Oh, my, my...isn’t that priceless? You? Not a murderer?” he snickered, then burst into full bodied laughter, slapping a hoof against the chair’s armrest. “What would all those you failed to save say? They died because you were not there. You made their lives your responsibility, and then you failed them. You may not enjoy their deaths quite like I do, but you enjoy their willingness to rely on you, weak and slow though you may be.”
“I can’t be everywhere at once!” I snapped, swiping the teacup off the table beside him with a sweep of my hoof. It vanished before it could hit the ground.
“No? I suppose that is true,” he murmured, turning in his gruesome seat to regard me with those cold eyes. “You do make a supremely excellent piece, though: the mad detective, who’ll climb up to the sky and shriek at the heavens to save the world. You are a masterpiece. Even more wonderful than I had ever hoped for; if you succeed, the ponies out there will pick apart every aspect of your life. They’ll find me, squatting in your history. I wonder if they might open me a gallery one day, with your corpse hanging from a gibbet right at the front door where the kiddies can swat it with little novelty bats on the way through.”
I shut my eyes and tried to breathe. It being a dream, there was no air, but the attempt was good enough.
“Is there some point to this?”
“I suppose there must be, else you wouldn’t have conjured me up,” he said, brushing his toe across the dead griffin’s beak. “May I ask you a question?”
I went to adjust my hat and realized I wasn’t wearing it. Nor was I wearing my coat or armor. The spot where my heart plug usually was had only smooth, pristine fur.
“Since trying to kill you twice seems like it won’t be very fruitful, I guess I can’t stop you asking.”
Stained Glass rose from his chair and turned to look up at a spot off in the distance. Folding his wings against his sides, he wet his lips, letting a slow smile spread on his features. Mercy, I wanted to beat that grin off his face with a tire iron.
“Do you ever consider the heavens, Detective?”
I blinked a few times, then shook my head. “What?”
“The cosmos,” he repeated, motioning at the air above his head. “Twinkling lights in the distance. The Princesses say the universe beyond is vaster than can be imagined. Does it not strike you as...perhaps a little strange that your species survives?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look around you!” he said, thrusting his forelegs in the air. “You have met plenty of things which could eat you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on this journey of yours. You have seen things that come from between universes and would snap you up in a single bite. Do you truly think it’s those alicorns protecting you? They barely rank as minor powers!”
I crossed my forelegs and shrugged. “I hadn’t put much thought into it. I’m usually too busy trying to survive to ask myself philosophical questions.”
“Then take a moment and consider the stars,” he said, dragging his leg across the sky. It spread open into a grand vista, a starry night like I’d only seen on childhood vacations. “Do you ever wonder at them? Their majesty? We cast our prayers up into the great beyond and our mothers and fathers tell us they are heard.”
“I suppose it’s better than the alternative,” I muttered. “I mean, if they’re not heard, that leaves an awfully empty universe.”
“Truly! But...one must wonder if there is power in all those wishes floating around up there. Makes you think, doesn’t it? This world of ours might be just a grand amalgam of all those wishes, cast adrift, waiting for an ear to hear them.”
I tilted my head. “And...what? Some ‘ear’ up there took all of the wishes of intelligent beings and...stirred them in a pot?”
Stained Glass clapped his hooves together and that irritating grin returned. “Who knows? It would explain how a beast like me survived alongside a paragon of noble stupidity like you, wouldn’t it?”
I studied the night sky above us for a moment, then turned to the killer and asked, “What does this have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. It’s your mind, detective. I am dead and, as your former partner has repeatedly told you, the answers aren’t all in the grave.”
With that, he melted away into the darkness quicker than a tail of smoke in a high wind, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
----
Nightmare Moon was not a happy pony. Being a pony was, by itself, a bit of an existential crisis. Being a male pony in mortal danger from every angle was intolerable.
“Skeleton, where exactly are we going?” she asked.
“Bones, Miss Moon. Unless you want me to start calling you ‘Mare With A Penis’,” her companion replied, still trotting ahead of her between narrow rows of cubicles. He paused for a moment to examine part of a light green muzzle that was sticking out of the wall near them. Holding up his fleshless hoof, he waved it underneath the pony’s nose, then exhaled. “Dead, or as close as makes no nevermind. I don’t know where we’re going. I’m following the curve of the wall. The entrance is down, opposite the control room, but gravity is real local and this fog isn’t helping.”
“Should we not be searching for Hard Boiled’s companions?”
“You got a method for that?”
She shut her eyes and let her brain tick over. It was strange, thinking with meat. Much of it operated off random number generators, but it was capable of incredible intuitive leaps if she allowed for a certain amount of fuzziness in her calculations.
“I...I believe I do. How many of the last few hundred cubicles we passed had bodies in them?”
Bones leaned forward a little, and she had the distinct impression that, if he’d had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. “Four.”
“I concur! Now, the spacing between cubicles appears to indicate a non-random distribution. Specifically, there were eighty-nine empty cubicles’ separation between corpses, preceded by one hundred and forty-four. I have counted.”
“Aye, I remember this from school. Golden Ratio and whatnot. Something about a perfect spiral in nature. You think we could follow the corpses?”
Nightmare shook her head. “It is an imperfect plan, but those who are here have been kept alive until their usefulness is at an end. I believe this...fog is some form of inhaled nutrient matter. Despite having been here for some time and vomiting, I have no physical symptoms of hunger. Assuming all the cubicle intersections are four way and assuming the most efficient distribution, we can base our start point on the cubicle I began in. It will give us a likely area to search.”
Bones tilted his head, then looked back the way they’d come. “How do you figure on finding that one?”
“We have trotted in a straight line from Dragonfly’s cubicle, yes? We simply return to her. If the nutrient fog requires a specific distance between each body for optimal energy consumption, then that would suggest a very regular distribution from the point of origin, which would be best placed at either end, presuming we are moving along the interior of a spheroid. If efficiency of motion within the constraints of what is necessary to make this reality exist is assumed as a priority of the creators, then at one end, the entrance...and at the other—”
“The control room! The control room was always opposite the portal! Hot damn. Never knew my loins would spawn somepony with brains!”
Nightmare lifted her nose and sneered. “Your loins spawned a pony who got us into this absurd situation! I am something far more intelligent than his weak flesh mind.”
“Yeah, maybe most of the time...but right now, sweetheart, you’re running on that weak flesh mind.”
Opening her mouth to rebut, she found herself short of words; Bones was, unfortunately, technically correct. Irritating.
“I...I do not have a lifetime of poor self-esteem, alcoholism, and bad attitudes holding me back. Apt he may be, but his psyche is a disaster. Now, can we please proceed? I would like to stop being an active participant in this mind as quickly as possible.”
----
Limerence held his breath, waiting for the beast to pass. It was as big as a two vehicle garage, and the scent rolling off of it was of burning hair and typewriter ink. Through the fog, all he could make out was the vague shapes of multi-jointed legs and a disturbing clicking sound, like trees in a high wind clattering against one another. It didn’t seem to have noticed him as he huddled beneath a desk, but there was no sense taking risks.
‘Well, more risks than I am already taking simply by being here. Oh, Father, what would you do in these circumstances?’ He paused, then snorted to himself, ‘Ugh, why do I even ask myself such questions? He’d be right here beside Hard Boiled, where any sane zebra would have told that stubborn, heroic buffoon to pound sand the second crossing dimensions was mentioned.’
It was then he noticed the clicking had stopped.
‘Oh...that snort wasn’t just in my head, was it?’
Slowly, he lifted his head from under the desk.
A multi-eyed face with two giant, mandibled jaws that looked like they could crush rocks was peering down at him from a couple of meters above. A thin, black dribble of something dripped from the creature’s teeth, landing on the carpet just in front of his hooves; the rug began to sizzle.
Moving as deliberately as he could with all four knees quaking, Limerence pulled himself out from under the desk and settled into the chair. The seat scooted itself back into place, then settled down. Doing his best to look confused, he tilted his head back to look at the creature, then at the empty desk.
“Work?” he murmured, in a voice he’d once used on his father when asking for additional study materials as a foal..
From somewhere overhead, a heaping stack of blank paper crashed in front of him with a loud thump. The creature gave him one last look which included a short grunt and a thin spurt of noxious liquid that scorched the cubicle floor. Its claws clamped atop the adjoining walls as it ambled away into the fog.
As he watched the beast leave, Limerence became aware of his own teeth chattering and quickly clamped his jaw shut He slid out of the stiff-backed chair and carefully stepped over the still smoking spots on the carpet. Giving a light tug at his vest, he quickly checked his watch; an hour and twenty left to escape.
‘Well, that could have gone worse,’ he thought, then mentally added, ‘Or I could, perchance, have avoided garnering that creature’s attention altogether. I mustn’t begin to think like Hard Boiled. Simply because a course of action works does not make it sound, safe, or sane.’
Sticking his head out into the aisle, he looked both ways, though precisely what manner of traffic he was looking for he didn’t know.
‘Presuming I am in a designed space, there must be a logic. A design logic means a functional mathematical algorithm. That suggests navigation should be possible without knowing the exact inner dimensions.’
He contemplated the problem for a few seconds while studying the entrances of the cubicles.
‘Hmmm...This is a sphere per Hard Boiled’s grandfather, so the ground must have a specific curvature and the cubicles must follow a particular orientation. I need to then establish the distance between them as well as the angle of the floor. Aha! A slight modification of the silly string spell to add additional tautness and toughness, then Melinga’s Measuring Stick woven into the substrate of the arcane formula…”
Lighting his horn, he shot a quick blast of string onto the top of the cubicle, then tugged it across to the opposite wall. Trotting around into the next cubicle, he did the same, then into the next, repeating the pattern. After a few more, he activated the second half of the spell, and his mind filled with numbers.
‘Hrm...the structure is an ovoid,’ he thought musingly as he studied the equations hanging in space behind his eyelids ‘That makes this easier. Orientation indicates a slight narrowing at one side and widening at the other. If the cubicles follow that pattern towards the center and I assume that we are closer to the entrance than the opposite side, that would suggest the control room is...that way. Now...a breadcrumb for my friends... How does that spell go, again?’
----
Nightmare’s patience was wearing thin as she trotted along behind the merrily humming skeleton. That he was merrily humming inside her brain didn’t help much; two bits of cotton plucked out of Hard Boiled’s trench coat pockets hadn’t done anything to fix the issue, and telling Bones to stop only seemed to amuse him.
‘Is there anything you can do?’ she asked, internally.
After a moment’s silence, a reply came floating through her mind.
‘Why do you keep asking me to do things?’ Gale asked disapprovingly. ‘I’m short of energy, and finding Hard Boiled is taking everything I have.’
‘You control this imbecile’s nervous system! Make me deaf or some such thing!’
‘How would that help? He’s not making any sound!’ the ghost replied.
Nightmare ground her teeth for a moment, then checked her mental counter of how many cubicles remained to their destination.
“We are near the place we encountered...D-Dragonfly,” she said, pitching her voice low to avoid any unwanted attention. She hoped Bones hadn’t caught the stammer in her voice.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you hadn’t seen a dead body before,” Bones murmured.
Nightmare bit her lower lip, pensively. “I...I told you that I am not my whole self. This mind contains only what was necessary.”
“No kidding.” Stopping mid-stride, Bones turned and slowly approached Nightmare. She hesitated and took a step back, but he kept coming until his boney face was only inches from hers and she was forced to stare into the shining, blue fires hanging in his empty sockets.
“Boo!”
Nightmare gasped and threw herself on her stomach, tossing both forelegs over her hat and mashing it across her face. She lay there, shivering, waiting for death to descend. After a few seconds, Bones’s raspy laughter filled her mind.
“Somehow always thought scaring a monster out of legend would be more satisfying than that. Of course, most of the monsters I put the fear of Celestia into didn’t have the good sense to be afraid until about two seconds before I cut my way into something vital. Maybe that just makes you a smarter cookie than your average abomination.”
Carefully pulling her hooves off her face, she looked up at him as she realized he wasn’t about to start making her hurt.
“You do not need to torment me further! I...I only want to return to my inert state where I could observe passively,” Nightmare whimpered, then shook her mane out in an attempt to regain her composure.
“If you wanted to do that, why take over his body?” Bones asked.
“I did not have a choice in the matter! My directive was to keep Hard Boiled alive at all costs so long as he continues to pursue his side of the bargain he made with my other self!” She swiped at the tears on her cheeks, feeling an embarrassed heat rise to her face as she realized she’d been on the verge of a crying fit. “How do you tolerate these infernal biological reactions to emotion? This existence is agony!”
“Wrong person to ask, sweetheart. Thirty years ago, I expected to wake up in the afterlife in my marriage bed next to my wife. Instead, I’m helping my nutter grandson’s possessed body search another dimension for a couple ponies who make my old Crusader buddies look sane and conservative.”
“Madness,” Nightmare muttered, angrily tossing her head. “All of it is madness. This world does not deserve the eternal night. It deserves to burn.”
Bones shifted his weight. “Since we’re not on our world, I’m inclined to agree. Now, which one was Dragonfly?”
“She...she was there,” she replied, nodding in the direction of the particular cubicle. “If I am correct, we can move along the axis of the sphere by ninety degrees and should find one of Hard Boiled’s friends somewhere close to that, if we presuppose the maximum efficiency principle holds. Though, to be clear, this is all supposition.”
“I’m leaving the math to you. I can’t be any more lost. Lead me home, Moonie.”
Nightmare started to ask him not to call her that, then realized exactly how futile that was likely to be. Trotting over to the cubicle where Dragonfly had died, she sat for a moment, staring at the splotch of fur on the carpet. A part of her was gratified that her math was correct, whilst another part wanted nothing more than to shiver in a corner.
‘Is it not odd to be so worried about death when all I want is to return to oblivion?’ she asked herself, silently. It was a question she had no good answer to.
----
“Ahhh, now there’s a sight I can enjoy: a cop crying like a mare what’s been slapped around but good. Makes me wish I’d lived a little longer to do it myself.”
A stiff breeze was blowing through my mane and my surroundings had changed again, but I knew where we were without lifting my head. I could feel the fur on my hooves and the wetness on my face. Worst of all, I could feel the gaping hole where I’d just been shot not thirty seconds ago.
My knees quaked as I uncurled from a fetal position and settled on my belly. The numbness in my breast was somewhat disturbingly countered by the sensation of wind whistling through the gunshot. I looked down at the steadily dribbling wound, then up into the ruined face of King Cosmo.
We were in his office in the Monte Cheval, in the seconds between the shot that blew bits of his skull all over me and my own death. He stood right where he’d stood that day just a scant few weeks ago, in the wrecked remains of his desk. I could feel the luxurious carpet underhoof, and taste the sweat on my lips. Not surprising, I suppose, since the moment had been seared into my brain with a branding iron.
Cosmo still wore his tailored suit stretched across that hulking frame. I was naked, which wouldn’t have bothered me on most days, but the ragged mess of shattered ribs and dangling viscera hanging out of the bullet hole in my chest was a little distracting. Out of morbid curiosity, I stuck my hooftip into the wound. It went in a good half inch.
“Heh, don’t play with it, cop. You’ll go blind,” Cosmo nickered, glancing out the shattered window at the drifting clouds beyond. There wasn’t much of his head left on that side. Thankfully, dreams don’t tend to come with nausea.
“Are you the ghost of Hearth’s Warming Eve present?” I quipped, wiping my bloody hooftip on the floor.
Cosmo pulled his handkerchief out of his front pocket and blotted some of his brain off his cheek, his one good eye swiveling to watch me. “Wouldn’t that be sweet? All the ponies you done killed comin’ to see you tonight? Of course, that line would be right long. You’d have to work your way through them damn fools that thought worshippin’ Nightmare Moon was a fine idea, plus all the goons from a’fore. Not to mention however many of them P.A.C.T. creatures used to be upstandin’ citizens. You know, plenty of cops go their whole careers never pullin’ their gun?”
“I’ve had this conversation before,” I growled, “I don’t need to repeat it with a mob boss who earned his fate killing people for money and power.”
“Sure you do!” the mobster chuckled, strolling forward and tapping me on the undamaged side of my chest with his hooftip while affording me a truly gruesome view of the broken window through the remains of his eyesocket. “Besides, you knew you were going to have to kill me the second you walked into my casino. You don’t strap a shotgun to a stallion’s family and strut away clean. Even more, you knew you weren’t never giving up that heart.”
“I didn’t kill you,” I snapped, pushing his hoof away.
“Only cuz somepony else beat you to it,” he replied. “Makes you wonder, don’t it? How many others did somepony else beat you to? Equestria has had its fair share of nasty customers through the years. I wasn’t even in the top one hundred.”
“So, what’re you saying?” I asked, settling my hips back on the carpet. “There’s something out there watching over us?”
“Could be. Could be.” He shrugged his giant shoulders and grinned with a mouth full of gold teeth. “Of course, if that’s the case, a brainy pony would ask themselves why they suddenly gone missing?”
The mobster gave me a last wink with his good eye, then stepped back as the breeze dropped off and the casino office faded from sight. I sat there in the dark again, without even my own heartbeat for company.
-----
Nightmare was so busy double checking her diagram of the interior that she almost missed the soft sob that filtered through the fog someplace ahead. Her ears perked at the sound, but her mind was occupied with the task at hand. Bones suddenly grabbed her and yanked both of them into the nearest cubicle. Before she could demand he unhand her, she found one of his forelegs lodged in her teeth.
He put his free hoof to his lips, then pointed up.
Carefully, she tilted her head back. A scream died in her chest as her lungs seized up entirely. She wanted, more than anything, to howl in terror, but the air just wouldn’t come.
Gale’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Nightmare, you can breathe again when you stop trying to make noise! If I have to make you pass out, I will do it!’
‘B-but there’s a...a thing! A big thing! Several big things!’
‘Use your words! I can’t see through the eyes right now! What did you see?’
‘I’m not opening my eyes again until the things are gone or they shall hear me!’
After a moment and much against her will, her eyelids were wrenched open. Her aching lungs were already burning for air which wasn’t helped by the spasm of fear that shot down her back at the sight above.
Bones was still there, pinning her to the wall, his head leaned back as he studied the creatures overhead.
There were three of the beasts, each one roughly the size of a city tram. They bore at least six many-jointed legs each that appeared to be gripping the tops of other cubicles, though it looked like several more hooked appendages were tucked beneath their long, misshapen thoraxes. Their black carapaces were blessedly obscured by the orange fog, but she could make out a series of glowing, bulbous protrusions along their underbellies that, much to her horror, seemed to have giant black pupils. They faced one another, seemingly completely intent on whatever was between them.
They made no sound; not even the whisper of breathing. All three were focused on a point between them. The soft sobbing was coming from that direction.
‘Oh...right. Yes, I get what you meant. Things. Um, I’m going to go back to trying to find Hard Boiled. Could you handle this?’ the ghost said, in a way that suggested he was whispering.
‘Don’t you dare leave me with this!’ Nightmare hissed.
‘Sorry, gotta go! There’s literally nothing I can do that will make the situation better, so please don’t get us dead!’
Her lungs came unbound and she could breathe again. It was a fight not to gasp. Still, the creatures didn’t move or acknowledge her presence.
“Don’t...speak,” Bones whispered into her mind.
She nodded as he took his femur out of her mouth.
“Move quiet and slow,” he murmured. “That map of yours...Where are we?”
Reaching down, she picked up the old diner napkin with the little diagram of the half-sphere on it and quickly checked their position. A sinking feeling squirmed into her guts. She quickly redid her calculations and came to an unenviable conclusion.
Looking up at the frozen monsters, she tapped the spot where they were, then pointed toward the place all three of the creatures were facing.
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Bones adjusted his coat, then stuck a hoof in his pocket and pulled out a fragmentation grenade. “Alright, can you remake this map? I’m going to create a distraction and see if I can draw those uglies off.”
Nightmare nodded, then quickly pulled another napkin and a slightly grungy pen out of her pocket. A few quick mouth-strokes and she’d copied the diagram. Holding it up, she cocked her head in a way she hoped said ‘What should I do?’.
“You’re going to go check if that’s one of Hardy’s friends. If it is, you get them out of there or, barring that, you hide nearby until I get there.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she quickly jotted down a sentence on the edge of the napkin.
‘What if it is somepony else?’ she wrote and held it up.
“Then it’s a P.A.C.T. trooper who was sent to kill us or someone else we can’t help. Leave them and return here. I’ll meet you as soon as I lose the plus sized creepy crawlies.”
Nightmare frowned at this. She knew, intellectually, that this should be entirely fine. Some part of her categorically rejected the notion of abandoning anypony to such a fate.
‘Ghost, what is this distress I feel regarding the health of other intelligent creatures?’ Nightmare asked, internally. ‘It is irritating.’
‘That’s called ‘empathy’, Nightmare. Hardy’s brain is chock full of it,’ Gale replied.
‘I would presume asking how I deactivate it or ignore it is futile?’
‘Completely. Just do nice things and it won’t bother you so much.’
‘I am Nightmare Moon! I am the stalker of dreams! I am a living embodiment of all that children fear! I do not do nice!’
She got a distinct sensation of mirth radiating from her chest, which only made her angrier.
‘Well, as my dad used to say before he went crazy and killed my mom; suck it up, buttercup. You can be nice or you can feel guilty, but you only get to pick one,’ the spirit replied. Then he was gone again, leaving her wishing he were an actual pony so she could beat him with a stick.
Bones was still waiting expectantly for her to acknowledge the plan. With a silent snarl, she shoved his copy of the map into his hooves and picked up her revolver’s trigger. The skeleton tucked the napkin in the collar of his shirt and spun the grenade on his hoof.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Bones added. “If this doesn’t work, I don’t want you charging in there and getting killed. You save nopony if you’re dead.”
Nightmare rolled her eyes, turned sideways, and pointed at the golden scales on her flank.
“Right. I’ll take that to mean I need to add ‘save stupid mind parasite from my grandson’s talent’ to the plan at some point in the future. Eh, get ready. Wait for the beasties to move off before you go.”
She nodded, and Bones took off into the fog at a full gallop, vanishing almost before she realized he was gone. His hoofsteps on the carpet faded in seconds, leaving her alone in the stinking fog. There was a quick surge of fear, but she wrestled it down, then turned to face the three monsters still watching something in their midst. They hadn’t moved, and if Bones hadn’t told her they could, she might have thought the beasts a particularly disturbing art installation.
When nothing had happened for several minutes, she found herself growing restless, but moving about or making noise seemed a poor plan for short-term survival. The creatures still stood where they had before, like frozen sculptures. A quiet moan or whimper would sometimes come from that direction, but even then, none of those had happened for some time. She looked up at the brim of Hard Boiled’s hat, then carefully took it off and studied the fabric, feeling the soft inner lining and the hard dragonscale sewn into the front.
‘How has this demented pony kept his head on his shoulders for so long?’ she thought to herself, turning the hat over. ‘It seems absurd that he should still be alive. One cannot just chalk this up to his talent or his friends, yet my calculations insist he has no fate. He is not important, a statistical anomaly sitting on an outlier…”
Nightmare lifted the hat back onto her head, working her ears through the holes as she felt its weight settle back in place. Somehow, it felt heavier than it had before. There was the weight of lives hanging around her shoulders, not just her own life, but potentially the lives of the entire Equestrian population.
‘This was so much simpler when my grandest desire was to do was bring about the Night Eternal. I am certain I could have determined out how to grow crops under the glory of the moon...’
Her thoughts were interrupted by a soft crack, followed by a shockwave that shook the fog around her. She jerked her head toward the monsters, but they hadn’t moved. They still seemed intent on whatever or whoever was in their sights. A few seconds later, another pop rocked the air, and the creatures finally responded.
The beast nearest let out a trilling cry and, with a clatter of chitin, it turned in the direction Bones had disappeared. One giant leg clasped the top of a cubicle, then it launched itself forward like an arachnid rocket, moving at a speed that belied its size. A third crack reached Nightmare’s ears, and the remaining creatures raised their giant, mandibled heads and shrieked a battlecry, before following their companion into the mist.
As the howls of unearthly rage faded into the distance, Nightmare found herself huddled against the trash bin, hugging herself. How she’d gotten there, she didn’t know, but it felt like the correct response. Picking up her tail, she hugged it against her chest.
‘Nightmare?’ the voice in her mind murmured.
‘Yes, ghost?’
‘You’re going out there.’
‘I do not think I am, ghost,’ she answered, putting her face against her knee, ‘I think I am going to sit right here. I may cry. I do not know why crying sounds so wonderful right now, but it does.’
She felt a wave of exasperation, then the sensation of something sharp being poked into her hips on both sides. She yelped and shot to her hooves, rubbing her flank against the cubicle wall in an effort to soothe it. The golden scales on her hips burned with a pain she hadn’t even considered possible.
‘This is what Hard Boiled’s body would be feeling just being in this place if I hadn’t been deadening your pain response. Justice has never set hoof here.’
“You must t-take the pain! I c-cannot think like this!” Nightmare moaned, grinding her thigh against the wall. “I cannot fulfill my purpose!”
‘When you’re ready to go for a little walk and see who is over there, I’ll make it go away.’
In seconds and without really realizing how she’d begun, Nightmare found herself galloping down the rows of cubicles. Cool relief washed down her sides, though the lingering memory of the burn still remained to spur her on. Her breathing was uneven, but still she ran until she was forced to stop for a moment to check her map. It hadn’t been much of a run, but she was still panting, though whether with fear or exhaustion she didn’t know.
‘That was cruel, ghost,’ she thought.
‘Letting you stay there would have been worse.’
Shaking her head, she unfolded the napkin and did a quick bit of mental arithmetic, then blinked a couple times realizing exactly how close her flight had brought her. Cocking an ear, she shut her eyes and listened. For several moments, there was only the sound of her own hurried breathing, but just when she thought she must have miscalculated, she heard a stifled sob.
Chewing her inner cheek, she considered her options. She could enter the cubicle and immediately pistol whip whoever was inside it. That would save most of the awkwardness of explaining her situation, though it might leave the individual with brain damage.
Of course, simply shooting whoever was in there was probably out of the question, much as a simple answer might appeal.
‘Nightmare...just go and look,’ Gale grumbled. ‘You’re being a wuss.’
‘I am a multi-faceted logic and probability bootstrapper! I am evaluating all the possible contingencies!’
‘Yeah, being a wuss, like I said.’
Rather than reply, she picked up her trigger and moved to the cubicle she thought the sound might have come from. Rising up on the tips of her hooves, she snuck forward until she could peer inside, ready at any moment to flee or possibly put six bullets in the general direction of whatever might threaten. At the sight of the pony in the cubicle, the bit fell out of her muzzle. She took a couple of stumbling steps forward, then hesitated as the horrid sight.
Taxi sat, slumped over the desk, her hooves planted side by side above a piece of blood spattered, blank paper. The blood was dripping from her nose in a steady trickle, joined at her chin by another dribble at the side of her mouth where it looked like she’d bitten through her lip. She was shaking, violently, muttering over and over to herself in a voice so low it could barely be heard, “I will not. I will not. I will not.”
Veins in her forehead stood out from the skin and Nightmare could spot her pulse beneath the surface of her neck. Reaching out, she carefully touched the mare’s back. Taxi didn’t so much as flinch.
‘How is she doing this? The mind control field is powerful enough to render a pony comatose.’
‘I don’t know, but you have to make her stop!’ Gale yelped in the back of her mind.
‘What? Why? She seems to be resisting the effects.’
‘She is going to kill herself! Her heart is about to explode!’
Nightmare pressed her hoof against Taxi’s back and felt the rapidfire beat of her heart, going very nearly too fast to separate the beats.
‘Wh-what am I meant to do?’ she thought, ‘She does not respond to touch! Should I knock her unconscious?’
‘I have no idea! Maybe she’ll listen to your voice. Or at least, maybe she’ll listen to Hard Boiled’s voice.’
Nightmare’s eyes widened. ‘I do not know what to say! Whilst we are in here, the mind control field will attempt to dominate her!’
‘T-then...tell her to stop fighting!’
“What?!” she said, aloud.
Taxi’s ears perked at the familiar voice. She exhaled, and a fresh drool of blood spilled out of her mouth, landing on her back legs. Her labored breaths grew thicker as the muscles in her neck started to clench and unclench in time to her violently pounding heart.
‘Tell her to let go! We can come back for her once we turn this place off!’
‘What about the pony eating carpet?!’
‘The work might take months to kill her! You’ve got to make her give in or she’ll be dead in minutes!’
Her throat tightened at that prospect; helplessness was unappealing, but inaction leading to a death seemed to carry a burden that threatened to crush her.
“You must stop fighting the work,” she stammered, lowering herself to Taxi’s height and trying to look into her eyes. “Pony, you must stop or you will be dead soon! Please, do not make me feel your death!”
Nightmare’s right hoof leapt up and smacked against her own forehead, sending her reeling backward. She stared at the offending leg, then gave it an indignant stomp.
‘Why did you do that?!’ she mentally demanded.
‘Don’t talk to her like that, dummy! You sound like somepony wearing a costume!’
‘I am somepony wearing a costume!’
‘Ugh...You have to talk to her like Hard Boiled talks to her!’
‘How does he talk to her?’
‘Like somepony he loves!’ Gale replied.
Nightmare’s muzzle dropped into a frown. ‘I spent a thousand years on the moon because I couldn’t figure out what being loved looked like!’
‘You better work it out, then! Unless you want to be stuck in control of this body, without your memories, without your powers, and without your armor. Hardy will go insane without her!’
‘He is already insane!’ she bit back, then gradually lowered her chin onto her chest. ‘But, I will try, because I do not wish to fail in my task and because you will probably irritate me until we are both dead if I do. Is there anything in his memories that may help?’
Gale was silent for a minute, then two. Nightmare shifted from hoof to hoof, wishing he would hurry his answer. Sweat poured from Taxi’s forehead as she quivered in the seat.
‘I...I do have something,’ he said, at last.
‘Well, describe it!’ she snapped, pointing at the pulsing vein in Taxi’s neck. ‘Time is short!’
‘I can’t describe it. You...you’ll have to see it. Don’t worry. I think this will be fast.’
‘Wait! What will be fa—’
Before she could finish the thought, she felt a wave of dizziness, and the Office faded to blackness.