//------------------------------// // Chapter 15: Xanthinus // Story: Meliora // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Jackie felt blood dribbling slowly down one of her wings. It wasn’t hers—she hadn’t been injured, at least not that she could tell. But just because it didn’t hurt didn’t mean that she hadn’t been damaged. She could still hear the gunfire, accelerator rifles firing straight into an unprotected crowd. You have crowd control weapons, you asshole. You already closed the portal. You didn’t need to hurt anyone. She longed for the days of Confluence, the great Central Compiler of the Enduring Ones. Before Charybdis had destroyed it, it had acted as a check on Athena’s power. An AI that was primarily magical instead of technological, and supposedly assembled from bits and pieces of pony souls too. While that compiler had moral imperatives, Athena had only her goals. She can’t kill humans. I guess she finally got over seeing ponies as human. The terrifying weight of that implication alone almost reduced Jackie to a shivering mess. She huddled in the space that was no dream at all, a world of drifting white. Her mere presence had already started assembling something around her, and for once she didn’t care enough to stop it. At least she didn’t accidentally create any Alicorn clones this time. Only the one she’d already made, which swam around her through the air. She was still bound by Jackie’s magic, so she couldn’t wander off. Jackie didn’t even have the energy to confine her. She no longer cared what the stupid thing did. “Did we win?” Alex asked, swimming up over one of her shoulders. She was no longer proper sized anymore, no longer armored. Just a fish now, without the whole costume she’d conjured to address the ponies of Mundi. Your costume was too good. She should really be going back to New Thestralia to see exactly how many helpless refugees they had recruited. “I dunno,” she croaked, shoving the fish away and wrapping herself in her wings. They were too small for that in the real world, but here she didn’t have to live by real rules. “This is why I don’t want to rule anything. I knew I was gonna fuck it up. It was only a matter of time until I found a way to ruin everything. Why couldn’t the real you have been here. She would’ve known what to do.” The fish was silent for a long time. Eventually she answered again, in a tiny voice from beside Jackie’s other ear. “Are you sure she would’ve done better? It’s her fault Athena is in charge in the first place. She could’ve stayed here to rule.” “She couldn’t have known it was going to go off the fucking rails,” Jackie muttered. Then her eyes widened, and she sat up. She didn’t have to defend Alex. This was her fault. At least some part of it was. She’d promised to sit by and do nothing for a thousand years. Let herself be banished by a program with unpredictable morals and goals. She’s never done this before. Just outright killing civilians like this. It’s not the same as creating a culture that makes ponies oppress each other. Then she has other people to do her dirty work. She just shot them. And plenty of her own ponies had seen. They had seen their friends and family getting murdered in cold blood by a monster even more terrible than they had imagined. Athena hadn’t been able to stop the spread of information about her puppet Alicorns, but she could stop word of the slaughter from getting out. All she had to do was kill them all. “Oh god.” Jackie found she was human again. It wasn’t anything she’d tried to do—but suddenly she had arms and legs and she was holding them up against her chest. “I just got fucking played.” The fish landed on her knee, and even simulated a decent approximation of moisture as she did it. “You got a million people out of Mundi. People that were oppressed, starved, worked to death. Sounds like you won to me.” “No.” Jackie brushed a few strands of pale hair out of her face. “Athena knew that stupid assassin couldn’t kill me. If she really wanted me dead, she’d use poison, or a sniper from a million miles—something I wouldn’t see coming and couldn’t stop. But she didn’t. She sent an assassin because she wanted Thestralia even more upset than they were already. She already had plenty of fuel to make Mundi hate us, but we didn’t really hate them. Except… I stopped him. I locked that bastard in Mercy’s library.” Jackie rose suddenly to her feet, wiping away tears. She wore little in this form—some short armor that generally approximated what she wore in battle as a pony. She didn’t bother with much past that and her knife. “He’s still in here.” She lifted up into the air, and suddenly she was stepping into the library. The ancient seed of human knowledge and intellect survived the end of its master Archive. Mostly thanks to Mercy. Jackie could feel her near—the unicorn that was now an Alicorn and also something more. In a way, Mercy was growing into the entity that Archive was no longer. Jackie strode through the shelves, conscious every moment of eyes on her. Some were bats, visiting this place to extract its sacred lore. Plenty more came from Mercy’s little servants and observers. Tiny figments that seemed to arise spontaneously from the library’s floating foundations, crawling over it to maintain and repair the place. They ignored her, just as they ignored all powerful dreamers. Of course, that would change if she tried to attack the strength of the dream—she didn’t think that she could’ve destroyed it now, even if she wanted to. But she didn’t. She found Mercy near the top deck, sorting through the shelves of Dewey-Decimal index cards with a glowing crystal horn. Thousands of cards moved through the air all at once, shuffling and rearranging themselves according to her will. It was a spell even the most powerful and focused unicorns would’ve envied. “Mercy,” Jackie said, settling onto the ground behind her. The crystal Alicorn would’ve been a head taller than she was, except that she was human now. Her head almost scraped on the ceiling. “I left a prisoner here a few months ago. Is he still here?” The Alicorn turned away from what she was doing. Mercy didn’t actually have to put any of the cards down, her horn just kept glowing. Incredible focus for a figment. But like all figments that survived the events that created them, Mercy had grown into something more. Jackie wouldn’t have been surprised if the energy from all the old prayers to Archive now found its way here. “Yes, you did,” echoed the crystal Alicorn. “This is a repository of knowledge. What purpose did you confine him here? He had nothing to add to my records.” “I was kinda pressed for time,” Jackie muttered, lowering her head apologetically. “I hope he didn’t cause much trouble for you. But I need him back. I’m wondering if he might be able to tell me what Athena is planning to do next.” “I can certainly return him to you,” Mercy said. “Follow me.” They left the cards in place behind them, still arrayed in the air and waiting for sorting. They didn’t have far to go. A side-door she didn’t recognize led to a single shelf of colorful books. It was mostly empty, with a few dozen volumes all on the same level. Mercy levitated one to her in the air, and Jackie caught it. The cover felt unsettlingly like fur, in the same bluish shade as the pegasus had been. “Oh god. You didn’t.” “The library will defend itself from dangers,” Mercy said, without a trace of emotion. “When my servants were not cooperative to his demands to return him to the physical world, he grew agitated and attempted to summon a storm. A few fragments of precious knowledge were nearly destroyed in the process. I defended my library.” She turned away, and Jackie found herself glad that the Alicorn was leaving her behind. She’d once been friend with this little construct, who had been her shy companion on the quest to create a volume of knowledge to give to every returning refugee. It seemed that very little of that pony had survived all these eons. Figments change. Even the strongest, stablest dreams eventually turn into nightmares. Jackie waited until Mercy had gone before running from the dark room and its other fur-colored books. She no longer had to guess at what those were either. “This isn’t going to help,” said a little voice from behind her. Her whole time in the library so far she’d been hiding from Mercy, circling Jackie’s head so she was always out of view. “You already know Athena wants a war. What could the assassin tell you that you haven’t figured out?” “How ready they are,” Jackie whispered, walking out onto a balcony and over to a chair big enough for a human to sit down in. It had been eons since she’d had two legs, but that didn’t really matter. She could dream of herself with perfect balance, and that was close enough. “Is the invasion coming tomorrow, or a year from now?” “I guess that makes sense.” The fish landed on the table next to her hand, staring down at the book. “You think you could… change him back?” She shook her head. “Maybe an Alicorn could. I’ve got bigger problems than that right now.” She wouldn’t have said it out loud, but this pony had tried to kill her. She had a hard time feeling any sympathy for him after that. She opened the book, flipping through its strange pages. She skimmed the words, and found it described the life of a high-class pony in Mundi, who had spent his days training in one of Athena’s military academies. You still have those? She read on a little further, morbidly fascinated by what Mercy had done. She’d somehow translated a whole life into the pages of this book. She could read the assassin’s own thoughts—learned his name was Polar Vortex, that he’d been the youngest of his family, determined to make a name for them. But being the youngest meant he wouldn’t be inheriting their wealth, so he couldn’t do it that way. But none of that really mattered. The story of a life Athena had manipulated and destroyed wasn’t uncommon in Mundi. She skipped near the end, where she found what Polar Vortex had known about New Thestralia. Very little, except that he had imagined that they were planning to attack Mundi itself, to destroy it in revenge for the way they thought they had been treated. Well I guess you weren’t completely wrong. We did attack. She found what she was looking for just a few pages from the end. The academies were all recruiting now, training soldiers even from the lower classes. There had to be thousands and thousands of them now. Charybdis was dead, as were all the other demons of Earth. That could mean only one thing. She couldn’t find any specific details about when the attack would come, or what weapons they would bring. The assassin had not studied far outside his realm of expertise. On more than one occasion, she found ponies had told him that he couldn’t know important details, in case he was captured. There were no specifics to glean here, not even the satisfaction of a rough interrogation against somepony who worked for her enemy. Jackie shoved the book aside, rising to her feet. “You’re not going to take him with you?” “No.” She didn’t even turn around, trusting the fish to follow her. And follow she did. “You made me a promise,” not-Alex said, as Jackie neared the library’s exit. “I helped you. Now you have to let me go.” She didn’t, exactly. Jackie could break promises, even to dream-entities. But the cost of doing so was a little of her power each time. Not to mention her reputation. Make a reputation for herself as an oathbreaker and she’d find her pool of contacts rapidly drying up. “No going to the real Alex,” she said, feeling her shoulders sag. “That still holds no matter what you do.” “I know,” she said, swimming right up to Jackie’s face. “But right now I’m distracting you. The ponies you just set free are the ones who matter. All… however many you got. Let me go, so you can deal with them.” She waved a hand through the air, dismissing the spell that bound her. “Whatever. Just don’t turn into a monster. It doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it.” She shrugged, flying just out of reach. Despite the end of the magic containing her, she didn’t grow any larger or try to get away. Jackie could still feel her little eyes on her as she cut her way back out into the real world, leaving the library behind.