Rarity kicked and writhed as strong hooves clamped down on her muzzle and pulled tight around her barrel. She felt the warmth of the pony behind her, pulling her to him. Then he reached out with a hind leg and kicked the door, closing it, plunging their struggle into pitch blackness.
She lit her horn. But moments after the cramped room leapt into deep, shadowy outlines, she felt the forehoof on her barrel let up on its hold. It shot up past her face—and then, all at once, her magic died.
The sudden feeling of absence came as a cold shock in her brain, and for an instant she was too surprised to struggle. In that instant, though, her attacker pressed his advantage: the hoof around her muzzle tightened, and his other hoof scooped up her forelegs in an iron grip. She planted her hind legs and pushed back on him as hard as she could, but he swayed backwards with her, merely chuckling.
“You’re welcome to keep fighting, but this here’s one of the good things about being an earth pony,” he hissed in her ear. “Now would you cut it out and let me turn the light on?”
Sweat bloomed on Rarity’s brow as Bon Bon’s message echoed in her mind. Adrenaline shot through her muscles, and her hind legs veritably pulsed with a visceral and barely contained need to flee. But as she pumped her legs against his powerful grip, she began to doubt she’d be able to fight her way to freedom. Her mind instead turned to the question of whether she could talk her way out of peril.
Rarity’s first step was to make a mental note of the fact that her attacker had admitted to being an earth pony. While that didn’t explain his abilities to seemingly appear and disappear at will, it gave her a hoofhold back into the conscious, thinking part of her mind. Her breathing slowed from sharp, panicky gasps down to something resembling normalcy. She struggled to stay focused on the sounds of her own blood pulsing in her ears, and on the mixed sounds of her breathing and his. Slowly she managed to relax her neck and forelegs, letting off on the pressure that she was applying to his restraining hooves.
“That’s better. Now, are we good to talk? And I mean talk, not scream for help from some ponies who are definitely not here to help? I had to turn off my silence charm to get your attention, and if they get wise to what’s going on in here before I can turn it back on, we might end up having a very different kind of conversation. Got it?”
A shudder passed through Rarity’s body. But then, slowly, she nodded.
In an instant, his hooves and body were off hers. The change was so sudden that she ended up stumbling backwards into space, overbalancing for the few moments it took to plant her hind legs firmly and get her forehooves to the floor. Only, one of them didn’t touch the floor, but something softer and more pliable.
“All right, got my charm back on; scream all you want. Now where’s the blasted pull-chain…”
There was a click. Then light from an overhead bulb flooded the supply room, glinting off the sundry items of metal and glass sitting on the rows of shelves that lined its walls. But the first thing that Rarity properly noticed was the corpse she’d stepped on: a light blue stallion with a blond mane, glasses that had been shattered, and a dark cloak covering most of his body.
Rarity stifled a scream, not wanting to lose what little composure she could muster in the presence of the pony’s killer.
“You done got yourself into a mess here, filly,” the mysterious stallion said. “There’s more layers of detection spells on this joint than a big fat tracking tiramisu. Good thing I’ve got a pretty darn strong charm of ward disruption, or they’d be just as thick on me as this mook was on you.” He shook his head. “I’ll be honest, though; I’m impressed that you managed to shake me so hard. Took me quite a while to realize you were giving me the slip, much less to figure out where you’d run off to. Course, the question that that leaves me with is… why? Aren’t you happy with our working relationship?” He squatted down next to the corpse and turned his face toward its. “I don’t think she’s happy with me,” he stage-whispered.
“Who… was that?” Rarity asked, fighting a tremor in her voice.
He sighed. “Irrelevant, that’s who. Just the guy watching the back door. Which, by the way, was covered, so you can forget thinking that you would’ve made it out of here. Want to meet him properly? Rarity, Irrelevant. Irrelevant, Rarity. Say hi, Irrelevant!” Rarity’s breath froze in horror as the stallion propped up the head of the dead pony with one hoof and worked their jaw with the other. "’Ello, Seneschal! Nice to meet you!"
Rarity’s stomach churned with the feeling of heat and the reminder of voiding itself the last time she’d seen the stallion. But even as she despaired over the unlikelihood of escaping with her life, she took a deep breath and fixed him with a glare. “Yes, I did indeed attempt to lose you. And if you want to know why, you need only look at the blood on your own hooves! You’re a madpony, and…” She hesitated, pulse pounding as she steeled herself to press onward. “And even if you kill me here as you’ve killed so many others, I would have you know that I will not be a party to the kind of wanton bloodshed that you seem so eager to commit!”
The stallion lowered the corpse’s head back to the floor. Then he stood, brushed himself off, and focused back on Rarity. “All right, what is it? What’d I do that set you off like this?”
“I should hardly know where to begin,” Rarity said, shivering. “But let us start with your sick joke about the candy maker! You said that you and I would get on like a house on fire, and practically a heartbeat later, the poor mare’s shop burns, leaving no survivors!” She felt a tingling thrill at voicing the lie, and a thick knot of fear that he would somehow know that she was lying.
He didn’t call her on it, though. Instead he snorted and shook his head. “Eh, don't give yourself too much credit for inspiring that one. It was kind of this old joke that she and I used to have with each other. She always said that she hoped I would die in a fire, and I always thought it’d be funnier if she did first.”
Rarity’s jaw fell. “Y… you are horrible beyond all possible imagining! Thus far you’ve fed me nothing more than honeyed promises of a better world, while your actions...” She pointed at the corpse. “Tell me: did this stallion have a family? Will there be somepony waiting up for him whose vigil will end in tears? You claim to have lost a wife, yet you have no compassion for those ponies whose greatest crime seems to be having the misfortune of standing anywhere near you!” She’d worked herself up to shouting, and she took a hoofful of deep breaths before finishing in a more even tone: “Honestly, it is no wonder why you needed somepony to reach out to the Resistance on your behalf, if you even care about working with them!”
He looked down at the floor, pursing his lips, fixating on a single point, breathing silently. He shuddered, then pressed a hoof to his eyes. “You’re right,” he croaked. “No, you’re… I mean, the only thing that I can say in my defense that it’s hard to do much of anything out there without racking up some kind of body count these days. You know what I mean?”
“Somehow I’ve managed,” Rarity said, trembling.
The stallion snorted. “No you haven’t. You might not’ve seen the ponies who died for you to be where you are. Maybe you tell yourself that you’re making ponies’ lives better in the Nightmare’s castle. But rest assured, you’re doing that on the backs of those who suffer silently to make it happen. I mean, do you think that all the deals your coltfriend Richy Filth does go smoothly all the time? How much blood do you think feeds the roots of his produce?”
“If you think you shall win me over by drawing a moral equivalency between what I have done and all the gleeful violence that you perpetrate—”
“I won’t,” he interrupted, before sitting on his haunches. “I can’t. You mentioned my wife… and honestly, anything you say about me now would pale in comparison to what she’d say about me, and about some of the things I’ve done, since I lost her. I just… I don’t know how to live without her. It’s like something’s broken on my insides.”
The stallion looked down at his forehooves, raising them slightly. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of just… just…” He lowered them again. “But every time I see a vision of her, it reminds me what I’m fighting for. And even if I get her back again… and if she can’t see the pony I was anymore because of the pony I’ve become… I’d accept that, if it meant she could be free. I’d sell my very soul to have another chance to give her a real smile.”
Rarity eyed him warily. Her glance flicked to a heavy paperweight on a nearby shelf. She considered trying to grab it and strike him while his gaze was fixed elsewhere.
And yet something about what he said stuck out in her mind: the recollection of dead eyes and a spectral grin in the window of Filthy’s home. It was the one piece that didn’t fit. And as she watched him hunching low and looking contrite, he suddenly seemed much less like a coiled weapon, and much more like a pony.
“I…” Rarity hesitated. She flicked her tongue across her lips, took a steadying breath, and decided to press forward. “I wonder… if I may have seen such a vision as well.”
He looked up at her with a hard expression and piercing green eyes that shone through the darkness of his hood. “If that was intended as some kind of joke,” he spoke slowly, lacing each word with the tension of implied violence, “then it wasn’t funny.”
“I… I would never think to joke about such a thing. In truth, I don’t know quite what I saw—”
“Her eyes,” he interjected. “Did you see the look of death within them?!”
Rarity held a hoof to her muzzle, nearly biting it. But she nodded.
“Her mane, hung limp and greasy?”
“I… yes…”
“Her smile?”
She shuddered, closing her eyes. She kept them shut, barely even managing to breathe, fearing what he’d do or say.
Some moments later, she heard the quiet movements, understated moans, and sudden sharp breaths of a pony crying. Rarity opened her eyes, seeing that the stallion had collapsed to his hind knees, had pressed his forehooves to his face, and was rocking back and forth, shaking with quiet weeping.
“I’m so sorry,” Rarity said weakly.
“No, don’t be,” he groaned. “You don’t know what this means to me. I thought… I didn’t know if I was going mad. But you’ve seen her!” He lowered his hooves and raised his head again, showing the outline of a muzzle torn between a smile and a grimace, dimly streaked with snot and tears. “I don’t know why you’d see her too, but I don’t care. Now you know that what I’m saying is true. She’s down there… and she can't be the only pony trapped like that. And if we manage to save her, we’ll probably save a lot of other ponies too, right?”
Rarity knit her brow. “It doesn’t make any sense, though; even if the Nightmare wanted to send visions of her to torment you, why would she do the same for me? I can’t think that I’d have known her as you did…”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. It hardly matters, does it? Maybe she thinks it's funny.”
“I wonder if there’s any other precedent for this.” Rarity’s eyes darted to where the pair of books lay discarded on the floor. She made to light her horn and pick up Returned From Tartarus, but the magic didn’t come. She cursed herself for forgetting that he’d slipped something over her horn, then raised a hoof and removed a metallic, rune-inscribed ring from it.
“For the mare who has everything,” he said, giggling.
She held it, studying the intricacy of the symbols that wound across its surface, as well as the hinge and clasp that could let it be clamped around a horn even in close quarters. “This is very fine craftsponyship, quite apart from its effects. Where did you get this?”
“Let’s just say I have a friend who takes a professional interest in evening the odds between ponies who have power, and ponies who don’t. Earth pony though I be, I've got charms for anti-magic, anti-detection… even anti-perspirant. It’s strong enough for a mare, yet pH-balanced for a stallion. But that ain’t the real hardware.” He bent down, flipped through her other book, then held it open. “Tell me what you make of these babies.”
Rarity examined the page, noting the same diagram of six stone orbs that she’d seen before. “I believe they’re the physical forms of the Elements of Harmony.”
“Ding-ding-ding. But that’s not all. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”
She hesitated, but eventually nodded. “I believe the Mistress is keeping them in her private vault.”
“Yes and no. Take a closer look.”
Rarity lit her horn, feeling a sense of reassurance at the simple fact that she could do so again. She used her magic to pull the book closer, then scanned the page. The word “six” teased the edges of her recollection. She pictured the display case in the Nightmare’s vault again—
“Five of the six,” Rarity said. “The Nightmare only has five of the Elements. But where is the sixth?”
He reached out, snapping the book shut, startling her. “Where do ya think, ladycakes? Tartarus!”
“But… how?”
“Me and the fam had front row seats when things went down at Ponyville. First, ol’ Sunbutt opened up a gaping portal to the lowest reaches of Tartarus right in front of us; that’s when I lost my wife. Then she started channeling huge jets of fire to try to knock the Nightmare in; that’s when I lost the rest of them.”
“I’m… so sorry you had to witness that. But that still doesn’t answer—”
“Honestly, if there’s one thing I can respect about Nightmare Moon, it’s how she turned a ‘superior’ opponent’s strength against her! A deflection spell here, a bit of dodging and weaving there, and pretty soon she had Celestia doing more damage to herself and her own ponies than anything else!” He paused, panting loudly. “So anyway, the Nightmare picked her moment, popped Celestia but good, and down came the Elements. Nightmare Moon grabbed most of ’em, but one rolled straight through the portal and into a cage on the other side. Took me a while to find out what the thing had been, and that what I’d seen of Tartarus was its lowest reaches. But the images… have never left me.”
Rarity furrowed her brow. “I wonder, then, if it could be possible to harness the power of the Elements against the Nightmare… if we could get into Tartarus and retrieve the missing one?”
“It’s more than possible,” he said with a wide, almost disturbing grin. “I’ve kinda taken an interest in reading-up on things that seem like they could stop the Nightmare, and the Elements are in my personal top two.”
“But how do we use them? And what about the Guardian of Tartarus?”
“I’ve got some things that can deal with the Guardian,” he said nonchalantly. “Beyond that, do a little more reading and you’ll see that one of the tricky things with the Elements is that they need some kind of spark to activate. I have it on good authority that the Resistance doesn’t have a buckin’ clue what that means, but I just might. I’d tell them what it is, but.... well.” He sighed. “Y’know. I kinda burned some bridges, candy shops, et cetera, that I probably shouldn’t have.”
“Yes, I should think they would tire of ponies like Bon Bon falling prey to misadventure—”
“Sweetie Drops.”
“Excuse me?”
“Anything that anypony ever told you about her is a carefully crafted lie. The truth is that she used to be a special agent in Celestia’s service, back before the sun went down. And she was there, too, when everything happened at Ponyville. Even saved my life… if you can call this a life.”
“And you’ve repaid her by burning her to death?”
“Yeah, well, we crossed paths a few times since then. I watched her turn from a mare you could trust, into a backstabbing jerk who lived to shove her muzzle anyplace it didn’t belong. And I know, I know, you’re thinkin’ it—sounds kinda like me, right?” He stuck his tongue out at her. “But trust me, she was way far gone. It would’ve made things much more complicated if she’d caught wind of what was happening.”
Rarity bit her tongue, not wanting to reveal either Bon Bon’s—Sweetie Drops’— survival, or what she’d seen of the mare’s cutie mark rubbing away and leaving an equals sign. But that thought led her to another point of curiosity: “Speaking of hidden identities, I fear you have me at a disadvantage; we still haven’t been properly introduced.”
He shook his head. “Not yet, sweetheart. If you like what you’re hearing, then you’re gonna have to get yourself an ‘in’ with the Resistance so we can make the magic happen. Left on their own, they’ll never be more than a bunch of overglorified farmers cursing the darkness. But their moment’s comin,’ and I need you to wake them up so they don’t miss it.”
Rarity’s pulse pounded again as she thought of what he’d said about other ponies coming to look for her. “Perhaps I should go, then, if it’s become too dangerous here. Do you know who the stallions in the lobby are?”
All humor vanished from the stallion’s countenance. “Let’s just say they’re not the Resistance you’re looking for. Let ’em take you, and all bets are off. You want my advice? Slip out the back, go say hi to your Sassy friend up at Blueblood’s, then throw her to the wolves, like we talked about.”
Rarity swallowed hard at the prospect.
He smiled and winked. “Ah, but you’ll do it your way, and that’s fine by me. Tell you what; let me pop out first and make sure the back door’s still clear. Which brings me to good old Irrelevant here…”
He bent down, took a small metal disc out of his cloak, and held it up, turning it back and forth in the light. “This, my dear, is just about the highest-level teleportation charm you’ll ever lay eyes on. Got its own internal power matrix, so it won’t leave a traceable teleport signature if you’ve taken the proper precautions. Just another one of those wonderful toys that a friend of mine makes in her spare time.” He bent down and set it on the corpse, then tapped it. “Only problem is, this one’s been damaged… and a damaged teleportation charm ain’t gonna get you where you wanna go. Say goodnight, Irrelevant!”
A quiet whirring sound like small gears grinding against each other came out of the disc, followed by what looked like bubbles of black energy that were accompanied by streaks of purple. The bubbling effect spread swiftly until it overtook the whole corpse, which faded into nothingness.
“Goodnight, Irrelevant,” the stallion said quietly. He reached up for the pull-chain on the light above, then paused and grinned at Rarity. “Hey, that reminds me of a joke: how do you keep a dummy in suspense all night?”
There was a loud click, and Rarity startled as the room plunged into pitch darkness again. She waited, counting her own breaths, for the stallion to turn the light on again, or at least to make some kind of sound.
None came.
At length, Rarity lit her horn. But all she saw was an empty storeroom.