//------------------------------// // Chapter 7 // Story: Starlight Glimmer (Accidentally) Raises the Dead // by SockPuppet //------------------------------// Mystic Heart looked from Starlight to the book and back. “Seriously? You’re blaming a book? ... wait, gross, is that book leather?” “Pony hide, actually.” Mystic Heart swallowed several times, fighting her gorge. “Where did that come from? Why did you read it?” “It... it talks to me.” “It talks to you.” “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, you’re not....” “Crazy?” supplied Mystic Heart. Starlight wiped her face, removing some ash, and maybe a tear. “I’m crazy, too, but my magic... I’m like an antenna. Some of the things I hear are real, just... too quiet for regular unicorns.” Mystic Heart snarled deep in her throat and pawed at the ground. After a moment, she said, “You’ve got buku magic for sure. I’m still mad about that... time... with my cutie mark.” “It was just an equal sign, nothing offensive, and I gave you and Storm Catcher a written apology!” “Did ‘the book’ give you that spell?” Mystic Heart asked. “It had some cutie mark spells, got me thinking, but no... that was ninety percent me.” “You wrote that insincere apology under duress from the mayor, and we both know it. And you’re still crazy. What do we do?” Starlight dropped to her rump, panting in exhaustion. “Mom ‘n dad ‘n I burned this book, once, the first time I tried...” and she waved a hoof at the graves. Mystic Heart shook her head. “You already tried this apocalypse once?” “I was mad, because at school, no colt would accept my invitation to the Saddle Hawkins dance. The colts will rut with me, but they won’t be seen in public with me.” “Have you considered fillies?” Mystic Heart asked. “You all treat me even worse than the colts. Seriously, if I just had one! Stinking! Friend!” Starlight wiped her eyes with a foreleg. “...I wanted an army to punish everypony. Mom bucked me in the lung a half-second before I cast the spell.” “Was that related to the three weeks you were ‘sick’ from school but everypony knows you slashed your wrists, right after you broke your ribs ‘falling down the stairs’ in a one-floor house?” Starlight gestured on the nose. “If only your mom wasn’t a stupid vascular surgeon, you’d be dead and I’d be warm in bed right now... Well, if nopony can burn the book... what?” “Mystic Heart, I’m sorry about all this, okay? I’ll... I’ll kill myself this afternoon or Friday.” Mystic Heart turned pale. “I didn’t really mean—“ “But help me deal with this book, first. I think Mr. Black Smith’s oxygen furnace will burn hot enough, and the liquid pig iron will suck its magic, but I don’t have the strength to break his locks. I’m too gone. My dad’s shed is unlocked and he has crowbars and lock cutters for getting into old antiques. Could you...?” Mystic Heart grinned and said, “I have the combination to Black’s place.” “What? Huh? Why?” Mystic Heart’s smile disappeared and her face turned magmatic. “Because you ruined all the colts our age, slut.” Starlight’s ears went cockeyed and she was silent for a few seconds. Then, “Ewww! He’s old! He’s, what, thirty?” “Twenty-seven. And he’s muscled like an earth pony. All right, come with.” “Statutory rape?” Starlight asked. “I’m eighteen.” “Eighteen and two weeks.” “Once this is done I never have to speak to you again, Starlight. I’m moving to Vanhoover as soon as I graduate.” Starlight staggered to her feet, and looked around. The corpses were slumping, slowly dissolving into the ground, thin streams of steam or smoke rising into the moonlight, but a quick differential equation solved in her head told Starlight they would still be identifiable come dawn. They were dissolving too slowly. She pictured a long night with a shovel after leaving Mr. Black Smith’s forge. You passed the test, intoned the book. Congratulations! This was all good fun, my new purple protégée! “Fun? You tried to kill me! You might yet succeed, there’s evidence everywhere.” Mystic Heart looked at Starlight as Starlight conversed with the inanimate object. Mystic Heart took a step backward. C’mon, my friend! I had to know you were worth my time and effort. I can’t go around showing the darkest secrets and deepest powers to just anypony, can I? I’m an abomination, and I need an abominable pony to match. I think we’re ready to take this show on the road, my friend. Want to be Autarch of Vanhoover? “Friend? Friend? You yourself said you were magically raping me. You said that!” Mystic Heart took another step backwards and her jaw slowly dropped open. What’s a little semantics amongst friends? asked the book. Plenty of mentor-protégée relationships start out all rapey. “Mentor this, my friend.” You’re being an idiot. This is a once-in-an-epoch opportunity. Your magic, my spells. It’s a better combination than peanut butter and jelly! Sun and moon! Black beans and rice! You’re making the mistake of the millenium. “And I’m correcting my mistake.” You’ve passed my test, that’s all tonight was. I had to know you were worthy of me. Starlight frowned. “Explain that.” I need somepony’s magic, and you’ve got the most I’ve ever seen, you’re worthy of me. I’ve got the knowledge you want, worthy of you. Don’t you see, you little purple slut? “I’m getting tired of being called a slut,” Starlight snarled. “Says the one-pony VD epidemic,” mumbled Mystic Heart. The book continued, I’ve been waiting millenia for you. You want to cauterize off ten thousand cutie marks? You need me. Find Sunburst and deep-fry his testicles and make him eat them? I can bring him to you. I could cure your mom’s uterus. And yours—your uterus is even worse than hers. You can’t found Equestria’s new ruling house without working parts. Starlight paused, and rubbed a hoof across her belly. Starlight remembered mom frowning while feeling her abdomen the Monday before. “That all sounds suspiciously like what you might think I want to hear.” Doesn’t make it any less true. “I’ve learned everything I’m going to learn from you. I think the next time I commit an atrocity worthy of a Princess’s personal attention, I’ll do it on my own. Goodbye.” It was a three-minute walk. The book babbled the whole way, threatening retribution and promising godhood. They snuck around the back of the forge. Mystic Heart turned the combination on the lock and opened the door. She smirked and said, "The combination is the date he and I first—” “Please don’t.” After the freezing cold of the magic in the graveyard, the hellacious heat of the forge hit Starlight hard. She turned her head, slitted her eyes, and breathed through her mouth. “Goodness.” Even with the forge closed up for the night and Mr. Black Smith in his bed, magical devices kept the forge and basic oxygen furnace at warm standby. The slag covering the molten pig iron glowed with a dull red through the clear sapphire viewport on the top of the basic oxygen vessel. Although most blacksmiths were earth ponies, the occasional unicorn blacksmith made for a high-magitek workspace, indeed. Mystic Heart levitated the book into a charging chute on top of the furnace’s heavy steel lid. Grabbing a scoop with her teeth, Starlight added two pints of grape-sized nickel nodules to the chute, on top of the book, then a scoop of molybdenum pellets. Starlight nodded toward the scoops of pellets, on top of the book. "Those metals quench magic," she said, and pulled the lever that dropped the contents of the charging chute into the liquid iron. After skipping backwards a few steps, Starlight pointed a hoof at Mystic Heart, who used her magic to yank the lever that lowered the oxygen lance—a long, vertically-oriented ceramic pipe—from the top of the vessel into the liquid iron. A second lever pull injected a heavy stream of pure oxygen, magically refined from the air, into the melt. As the impurities burned out of the pig iron, its temperature spiked, the red glow turned yellow-white, filling the room with intolerable brightness and forcing both fillies to turn their heads away. The book screamed in agony, gibbering a hate-filled wordless howl. Starlight collapsed down to the ground, flat on her belly, scrunching her eyes shut and beating her own horn with her forehooves. It was a magical hurricane, a tornado, worse than being hit by the Friendship Express at full speed. She mewled as the nameless magic tore into her hypersensitive mind. Starlight hit herself in the horn as hard as she could, trying to silence the hurricane of sensation. As it dissolved into the demonic heat of the oxygen-pumped fire, the book screamed profane invective at her, in languages of demons and monsters and eldritch abominations ten of millions of years lost to time and space, and Starlight heard and understood every blasphemous syllable of a speech no pony was ever meant to experience. Her very soul quailed, her higher mental functions checked out, and she went into a fugue state. The entire universe was simply pain and agony and fear. Her head swam in torment from the magical assault as ten thousand years of evil was burned out of the mortal world, and she beat her horn, the most sensitive part of her unicorn body, with all her strength, trying to cripple herself to make it stop. Mystic Heart felt the tremor in the magic around her. Her own horn stung, and she smelled the fetid stench of an unsealed crypt over the strong burned-metal scent of the forge. She glanced toward the white glow from the furnace. Ephemeral gray-green smoke and fuligin sparks swirled from the still-open charging chute at the top of the furnace's lid. The blast of flowing oxygen beat at her ears. Mystic Heart heard—heard with her horn, not with her ears—a fading, desperate voice: You slut you slut you can't do this to me I've still killed you back you'll never clean up all the evidence... Mystic Heart's jaw dropped open. Starlight had been serious! The grimoire really had been giving her orders. She looked down at the younger filly to apologize, and saw Starlight hitting herself in the horn, a tremendous stream of pungent urine spreading around her thighs and under her tail, body shaking like an epileptic seizure; Starlight beating her own horn, with her full remaining strength. Burns and blisters were easily visible on her snout, flanks, and back, arising from her earlier burns. Mystic Heart wasn't a doctor, she was of only modest intellectual gifts, and her education in the small provincial school wouldn't have been very good even if she hadn't missed over a full year for her cancer treatment. But. But, every unicorn in the world knew how much it hurt to have your horn hit. Clearly, Starlight was in a full self-destructive meltdown. Starlight was in danger of permanently maiming herself, or giving herself brain damage, as she tried to silence the book’s death howl. A second flood of urine erupted and Starlight vomited, her snout buried in the puddle, breathing vomit, threatening to drown herself. Mystic Heart hated Starlight, but Mystic Heart owed Doctor Glimmer her very life. And Doctor Glimmer loved Starlight. She grabbed Starlight's forehooves with her magic, stopping her from hurting herself worse, and then grabbed Starlight's tail in her teeth and dragged her from the forge into the open night air. After a few minutes, Starlight, panting, rolled onto her back and threw a foreleg over her eyes. "Thanks." Mystic Heart smacked her lips and rolled her tongue, trying to get the taste of Starlight's tail and urine out of her mouth. "You peed yourself!” "No. Did I?  ....ew, I think I did.” "Oh Celestia, am I going to get... get... oral galloporrhea from you? Bad enough when you gave it to me the regular way through my ex-coltfriend." "Did you hear it? Hear it die?" Mystic Heart flicked her tail. "The book?" "Yes." "Yeah. I heard it. But with my magic, not my ears. That was... is that what happens to you every day?” “Yeah.” Mystic Heart flipped her tail and frowned in thought.  “I repent for every time I envied your magic. Average is good. I’m glad I’m average.” "It was screaming loud." Starlight flipped over, onto her belly, and tried to stand, but failed, and laid there, panting, legs splayed. Vomit smeared her face and urine soaked her belly, privates, thighs, and tail. Mom staggered up to them, a towel dark with blood wrapped around her hindquarters like a diaper. Whispering harshly, she said, "What the crap are you two doing here? I’ve been chasing you, trying to find you two!” Starlight looked up at her. "The zombies are dead. The book is gone." Mom stomped. "You said that before, you little liar!" Starlight's face took on a snarling expression and she opened her mouth to retort. Mystic Heart held up a hoof. "I heard it die. I think we got it, this time." Mom snapped her mouth shut. "Well, then. Evidence?" Starlight tried hard to stand. She literally could not, no matter how much she tried. The missing blood, the magic, the fight, the book's death-howl, the residual dizziness from beating herself on the horn, she had nothing left. Mom said, "Rest for a few minutes, love-bug. Mystic Heart, could you be a dear....?" "What? After the last hour, you want more help from me?" Mom nodded. "Can you get her a jug of apple juice from your family's store? That'll get her back on her hooves faster than anything." "Cyanide," Starlight said. "I want cyanide." "Shush, honey," mom said, frown deepening. “Don’t talk about suicide again. Please.” A cramp ripped across mom, and she gasped and panted in pain. "Oh Celestia. The worst is over, I think, but that hurts. Starlight, what the holy hell were you thinking? What'll I tell your dad Friday night when he gets home, if you're scheduled to hang Saturday at dawn?" "I wanted to get Sunrise back for you, mom. You want a foal so bad—and I'm the worst foal in Equestria. I tried to raise Sunrise for you." Starlight had needed sixteen years, but it finally happened: she rendered mom speechless. A half-gallon of apple juice and a fifteen minute nap got Starlight back on her feet, and just enough of her magic restored to levitate the melting corpses one at a time. Mom and Mystic Heart, working together, had the combined strength to lift the smaller corpses, one at a time, and move them. Mystic Heart was a very magically mediocre unicorn, and mom’s levitation had a surgeon’s incomparable precision, not Starlight’s brute power. They carried the pony corpses and one coyote carcass a thousand yards into the woods, piled them up, and Starlight prepared to pour the remaining booze on them. “Why’re you using that?” Mystic Heart asked. “We’ve got lamp oil and pitch in the store.” “You didn’t think of this two hours ago?” Starlight snarled. “I didn’t know why you wanted booze, then!” Mystic Heart trotted off, cursing Starlight and her future paramours in anatomically impossible fashion. “Why didn’t you think of that?” mom asked. Starlight looked at her hooves, then gestured at the woods around them. “What’s the definition of an alcoholic, mom? I can’t see the forest for the booze, I guess. When I see the store, all I see is...” Soon, Mystic Heart returned, levitating three one-gallon tins of lamp oil. They poured it everywhere over the bodies. Unfortunately, it had been a rainy month, so the sticks and kindling on the forest floor were too wet to add to the pyre. On the other hoof, there was no danger of the fire spreading to the whole forest. Starlight's magic was recovering rapidly as the sugar from the apple juice hit her bloodstream. She lit the pyre with her flame spell, and the whole mess went up in a sickening cloud of sepulchral reek. Mystic Heart heaved but didn't throw up again. Starlight looked away and breathed through her mouth. Mystic Heart said, “Doc? Doesn’t the smell bother you?” Mom said, “I did two autopsies this morning.” They stared at the pyre for a few minutes as the evidence of Starlight's worst crime (so far) burned away. The three of them walked to the graveyard and began smoothing over the split-open graves. The horizon had the tiniest hint of dawn when mom said, "C'mon, let's put Sunrise back." Mom saw the swaddling blanket and bottle of formula that Starlight had carried with her, still sitting next to Sunrise's coffin. Mom looked at Starlight, and they both burst into tears. Mystic Heart trotted a dozen yards away to give Doctor Glimmer and Starlight privacy while they finished crying, closed up the tiny coffin, replaced it in the hole, and began scooping the dirt back with their hooves. Starlight looked around the graveyard. "Well, it's obvious somepony did something here, but no jury would convict for necromancy. The worst I'll get is vandalism." "There's still burglary on my family's shop," Mystic Heart said. With a nod, Starlight said, "I can fix the lock and clean up the blood. I remember a pretty good evidence-covering-up spell from chapter seven of the book—" At Starlight's word 'book,' mom snarled, spun around, and bucked Starlight right in the face. The last thing Starlight saw were mom's two rear horseshoes making contact with the tip of her nose.