Interlude
“We’ve found them.”
Midnight Blade stabbed a knife into the map. The map seemed bare until Abstraction noticed it depicted the sea, the North Luna Ocean far to the North-West, better known to the locals of Vanhoover as the Inua Sea after the old Musk Oxen Moon Deity. The place, as any local knew, was a misty, frozen death-trap filled with Luna knew what, where ships would sail forth and lose themselves in the fog.
“Vamponies on the sea. It only makes sense.”
“I thought Vamponies didn’t do well on the waters? Certainly not seas blessed with Alicorn magic” Neolith pointed out.
“Something’s allowed them to traverse the waters.” Aversion piped up beside Abstraction “We suspect it’s the Eligo Calque. Rue can explain.”
Here, an unwelcome guest at the fort stepped forward. A Vampony mare. Like all Vamponies, she had a thin coat that appeared hairless, Her back was a dark indigo with her face and underside deathly white. Her mane was ruddy and wild and upon her forehead was a blood-red disk like a red full-moon, veins running down her brow to give it the look of bleeding. Her irises were a brilliant blue, fully encompassing her eyes. Her sharp teeth showed whenever she spoke but shorter and closer together than the normally shark-like jaws of the typical Vampony, more like a tiger or a bear than anything else.
Her better-kept appearance denoted a ‘pureborn’ upbringing, a creature born as a Vampony, likely from parents of the same upbringing. Yet her venomous blood-magic was nulled of her own volition.
Aversion had befriended her in the early stages of their investigations and now she was their best chance of putting an end to the threat.
Monardaruta iz Ululo, or Rue for short.
She spoke.
“My uncle’s obsession with the Eligo Calque began when my father discovered it. My father was able to hide his curse from ponies and lived as an excavator. Neolith would know of him.”
“I have?” The archaeologist asked skeptically.
Rue nodded.
“Among ponies, he went by the name of Professor Pupilloid.”
Neolith’s eyes widened.
“Your father was Professor Strobius Pupilloid?! Sweet Luna, I have all his books!”
“Well, yeah.” Rue shrugged bashfully “I didn’t have much to do with that. But the Eligo Calque was found by his hoof, an old experimental Hippomorphian invention that would essentially remove physical defects from a living body.”
“And take them where?” Fletcher asked.
“He never got that far. His work only took him so far until my uncle found out.”
“Your uncle being King Orculus iz Ululo?” A bright blue unicorn stallion with black mane arranged in elegant curls and a trim mustache pointed out, brow furrowed at the creature.
“Yes. And I’m no happier about it than you are. It feels like an age ago...It probably was. My father was examining the Calque one evening, nothing out of the ordinary. But then...creatures come after him...Creatures like me. My uncle had sent the family retainers to take his Calque and his daughter from his possession. They tried to kill him. I don’t know if they succeeded. When I was brought back to Castle Ululo, my uncle was waiting for me with my mother, Alvarielle. Uncle Orculus had lost his mind! He said he was going to use the Calque to remove all the weaknesses the alicorns gave the Vamponies. Make them gods of the new world. A ritual was in progress. A ritual to Mov Carnis.”
“Is that some sort of god?” Abundo asked with distaste.
“It’s our name for him. The old name is lost but ponies used to call him the King of Salt and Screams. A daemonic prince, patron of domination, bloodshed, cannibalism, torture and...violation.”
“By that you mean...
“Not the civil kind, no.” Rue interrupted White Wolf’s question “I don’t know by what means he heard him but Orculus did as Mov Carnis bid. He...impregnated my mother. In what seemed like hours, she gave birth. They poured some kind of salt into my eyes. I was blinded but I heard the baby’s screams. My uncle held something up to me and I was told to feed. I did...I was still a fledgling and terrified. I bit into something and the baby’s screams grew louder, horribly loud, and then...stopped.” She gripped her chin with a shadowy red claw and choked slightly, red tears escaping out the corners of her eyes. Those around looked at her with something resembling pity.
“They made you...eat the child?”
“...yes.” She answered quietly “And when I did...I had this on me.” She pointed to the red moon on her forehead “According to my father’s calculations, me and Luna share a date of birth.”
“But that would make you-”
“Just a bit younger than you, yes.” She gave Midnight Blade a half-smile “I don’t know if he was correct but it convinced my uncle. He seemed convinced I was part of some prophecy. My essence added to the Eligo Calque would allow him to strip away the weaknesses of Vamponies, make them perfect, make them invincible.”
“Well then, I’m afraid to prevent him acquiring your essence, you will have to remain under our custody for the time being.” Midnight began.
“No, no, it’s too late. He already has it.”
“You gave him the means to use the Calque?” The bright blue unicorn stallion growled.
“I didn’t want to...Not until my uncle gave me to Mov Carnis.”
There was another pause.
“And...that gave him...”
“My blood...my tears...other things.” Rue’s face was flat but looked a hair’s width from shattering to pieces“...I’m sorry.” Aversion said flatly.
“So he has the Calque?” Atgeir supposed “And it obeys?”
“Well, that’s the thing. He doesn’t seem to know how to use it. He burned father’s workshop with all his notes with it. Uncle Orculus lacks my father’s knowledge...and patience. He’s been able to use it recently but only slightly.”
“I’d hardly call giving Vamponies the ability to traverse salt-water ‘slight’. Already, they gain a severe foothold in the war against the living.” Fletcher said gravely “We must act now while there’s still time.”
“We gather a warhost.” The bright blue unicorn stallion announced, “We storm the aberrations and scourge them upon the light of dawn.”
Rue gave an uneasy look. Aversion patted her shoulder and whispered.
“Don’t worry. They don’t mean you.”
“I’ll gather some folks from back home.” Wolf gave a sharp grin “Vamponies are their specialty.”
“Right. Rue’s supplied us the castle layout. We can hit them where it counts.” Midnight said, removing the knife from the map “It’s do or die, chaps. These are master Vamponies, necromancers, who knows what else? We may not live through this. But we have to stop them, here and now, or before too long...everypony you have ever known will be one of them.”
The cacophonous cries of skull-hawks sounded above in the icy haze. Bitter snow rained down upon the two armies gathered upon the great bridge of Castle Ululo.
A host of black iron stood to attention on the shoreline, dotted with anomalous colors. The Lunar Sentinels had gathered, mares and stallions in full-body dark armor with plumes or streamers of navy-blue and white, steely eyes looking out of silver visors. Possessed of the hallowed silver arsenal, the Sentinels were Equestria’s anti-undead specialists.
Standing beside them were other specialists. Members of the Dark Horse Squad, each in their own element. Members of the original Slayers Guild or the Paladins or other, stranger members. The Alchemists of Allia-Sativa, the Knightly Order of Nocturna Redemerant, the Chi-Oni-Ryoshi Dojo, whomever was strong enough and insane enough to charge into battle against an army of Vamponies.
Before them stood the tide of bloodthirst that was the Ululo Army. An assembled horde of brutality and egotism.
At the front were the Haemomancers, expert practitioners of blood magic, bedecked in fine black and red capes, their skin grey, a lifetime of the abuse of such forbidden arts reducing them to near corpses. It was they that commanded the bridge-defense with powerful spells and zero mercy.
In front of them were the Unstaunched, fiends in spiky carmine armor. Looking more like bizarre, red mantises than anything else, they carried weapons decidedly more suited for torture than actual battle, blades, axes and flails with awkwardly long jaggs and points. Nonetheless, their Vampony reflexes, combined with the sheer viciousness of their individual dispositions, would surely give them an edge.
And in at the head of the army, glorified cannon-fodder, were the abominable creatures known as Drybloods, hulking, hunched, hairless maniacs with grotesquely overgrown limbs and shoulders and mouths of sharp teeth and tusks crammed into gaping mouths. Their wings had grown small and stunted, twitching uselessly at the tip of their massive shoulder-blades but their speed, strength and raw ferocity were not to be underestimated.
The two sides were mostly making glares at each other but each one knew the first step forward would send blood flying high. And wouldn’t that be most appropriate in a Vampony den.
Atop the high, squat, stone towers on the side of the bridge, Fletcher Fray, Neolith and the ranged troops crouched under the walls, ready to fire. The tower opposite was too damaged to serve as a firing platform but it would be perfect for the fliers to disembark from.
Then again, around a Vampony castle, would could barely trust the air one breathed, let alone the sky.
At the front of the Lunar Army, Midnight Blade, Aversion and Abstraction stood, hooves hovering over their blades.
“Stick by me, lads.” Midnight whispered “You’ve got us this far. But that doesn’t mean you go ahead.”
Abstraction gave a quiet, impatient tut while Aversion nodded.
Behind them, a cowled mare drew cryptic symbols with mader dye in the stone beneath her hooves.
Midnight took a deep breath and, shaking his cape off his shoulder, drew up one wing.
Fletcher Fray stood and fired into the sky. A streak of azure flame soared high and pierced the clouds.
One of the Haemomancers screeched a Camnetic curse.
The arrow exploded in mid-air, a blinding blue light enveloping the bridge for a brief moment.
Blades drew, hooves thundered, wings spread, horns lit...
And all hell broke loose.
The Drybloods flung themselves forward, hissing and screeching. The Alchemists threw their anti-Vampony ingredients forward in bomb-like clumps but against such advanced vampiric creatures, it did little more than stun them for a moment.
But a moment was all Rue needed.
Throwing off the cape, the fallen Vampony princess stamped the symbols and screeched at the sky.
The mist subsided. The clouds parted.
Sunlight bore down on the Vamponies. In their previous endeavors, Rue had found the cure for her weakness to sunlight with Aversion and Abstraction’s help. Now, against her former jailers, it was her weapon to wield.
Midnight’s namesake pointed straight at the gates to Castle Ululo as the Lord Commander of the Eternal Knights bellowed the war-cry.
“NIGHT COMES FOR YOU!”
A guttural chant echoed throughout the castle exterior as a black smog ran like horse’s hooves across the stonework. Silently pulling themselves from the ground and walls, pitch-black skeletons emerged, eyes glowing red. At the steps toward the courtyard, Viceroy Graveleon completed his throaty incantations as the dead rose across the walkways.
Graveleon was a ghoulish goat, fur of dirty grey with twisting horns, clad in pale bone-armor and dusky ribbons. His incantations finished, he cackled as the horde of black bones and barbarism stood ready to entrap the attackers on the bridge when the time was right.
Then a boat honed into view. Graveleon’s dull black eyes narrowed in suspicion as his skeletons stared blankly at the oncomer.
The ship was a modest afar, a ramshackle beast-carrier with frayed sails, slow, silent and unimposing. But what was noticeable was a borrowed figurehead. A great, ash-wood carving of a coiling, curving tree with the heads of four stags arching out of the woodwork in all four directions.
The World Tree of the ancient Northern deer and their four seer kings, Dauthinn and Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Durathror.
It stopped off the rocks before the steps, nearly aground. Off the ship, a silent host of tall, antlered creatures emerged, flanked by a hundred-strong pack of huge blue-eyed wolves.
A blue Pegasus with a shock of snow-white mane and pointed incisors drew two knives as she took her place between her adopted parents. Before the Wolfsong Clan however, stood two dozen long-haired ponies and deer, at the head of which stood an enormous blue-furred elk with arching antlers as long and wide as a horse.
Amarok the Frostfur, last of the Megaloceros.
Cricking his neck, he spoke, his voice like the biting frost of the mountain winter.
“We delve into the rock, brothers and sisters. Send those robbed from death to their place of rest and those who cheat death to the mouth of Hel.”
“I envy whoever gets to judge the bastards.” White Wolf the Stormrunner spat as the undead turned to face them.
“In this life, we are their judges. Whatever comes afterward is in the gods’ hooves.” Amarok said gruffly to his part-time student “Show no mercy to those ripped from the afterlife! Condemn their summoners to the end they fear so dearly!” He raised his hoof as the clouds parted. The outline of the full moon shone with a metallic hum.
“May Fenrir’s bite grant us teeth and claw!” Amarok yelled to the heavens “Glory or death, blood of the wolf!”
There came an almighty howl as the shaggy creatures at the head of the warhost crouched, gripped themselves and shook in agony as their bodies warped. Their forehooves sprouted fingers and claws, their back hooves spread to paws. Their muzzles grew dark, wet noses and sharp, canine teeth. Their eyes furrowed, their ears grew tufts, their shoulders arched and they steadily stood on two back-legs as hunching hulks of muscle, fur and fangs.
Lycantheres, fole-wolves, geit-wolves and hirt-wolves. Carnivorous, moon-worshipping powerhouses.
Fighting the Vamponies with their favored weapon; savagery.
Atop the stair, Viceroy Graveleon stared in horror as the horde of howling monsters ploughed through his skeletal guard, the deer behind them firing off enchanted arrows, rendering the undead not so ‘un’.
As he prepared a spell, he cried out in pain as a knife landed deed in his shoulder. From above, the blue pegasus dived, back-hooves first, and landed a powerful kick into the goat’s face.
Struggling for his hooves, his horns coursed with red lightning as he fired wildly into the sky. Raising his hoof and keeping the Pegasus in his sights, he prepared a spell that would surely send her down upon the rocks.
The next instant, he was staring at the leaking stump that was his forehoof, feeling powerful cobalt-colored claws clutch his shoulders, lifting him off the ground.
The last thing Viceroy Graveleon could do was scream in dismay as the jaws of the Amarok Frostfur closed around his face.
Blades, arrows and bolts of magic rained across the bridge like iron hail.
The Sentinels were pushing through, the Dark Horse squad leading their detachments forward.
Leading the charge was Siyarjit, his mighty golden mace sending tremors through the air, brightly-colored lightning crackling wherever it lay its mark. Spinning round, the handle of his mace extended and coiled and with a snake-like hiss as loud and sharp as thunder, a great whip of blue-flame snaked across the bridge, cutting his way through to the gatehouse. With a cheer from his command, he surged forward.
Then out of the gatehouse stepped a giant. A towering stallion, at least as tall as a fully-grown Alicorn, but reed-thin and draped in an ugly, puce coat. With a hoarse, screeching cry, like a dozen vultures calling out at once, he lurched forward.
The sight of him set Siyarjit stumbling as he realized the coat was in fact skin.
The wearer’s skin.
The beast had been flayed alive and yet lived still. His wet, crimson, skeletal frame, exposed to the elements, writhed and flailed wildly as the skin-cloak flapped morbidly around it. Trailing along the stone in its forehoof was an enormous rusty scythe, screaming as it scraped the rocks and cut swathes in front of its wielder again and again. The bright blue unicorn barely had time to duck, which was more responsive than the six unfortunate sentinels following up behind him who, as one, jerked macabrely as they fell to the ground, their heads rolling down the bridge or into the waters below.
He cursed as the gatekeeper kept up his relentless assault, the Ghoran unicorn fighting for space as he drew closer to the tight, chaotic battle-scape.
“To the gate!” He yelled, “Kill the beast!”
Midnight raised his head above the madness of blades and cursed. The Gatekeeper was sure to cut down the first pony to came to the blue stallion’s aid. For this, one would require a special blend of strategy and ferocity.
“Rookie!” he yelled to Abstraction who was busy cleaving his way through the Unstaunched with his phenomenally large blade he held in his magical grasp, utilizing stance and equilibrium to better wield it without exhausting his magical power, as is he were holding it in his grasp and moving as it did.
Midnight always called him ‘rookie’. He wasn’t anymore but the name had stuck and would until the next one came along.
He looked to the gatekeeper, worked things out in his head, and nodded.
Batpony and unicorn charged forward on the left and right side of the bridge.
The Gatekeeper shrieked and brought his scythe round and both oncomers teleported, one in light, one in shadow.
Midnight appeared above the blue stallion, falchion up in front of him sideways-on. The scythe met it with an almighty clash. Then a blade about as big as the scythe came down from above.
The screech from the Gatekeeper stopped abruptly as the scythe fell to earth, then the Gatekeeper, then his head.
Midnight gave the stallion a dutiful nod, ignoring the conflicted face the Ghoran Prince wore, and slid his blade between the doors, dragging it up and snapping the metal locks like dry straw. He bellowed to his victorious force, battle-worn and wide-eyed.
“Into the monster’s mouth!”
Rue and Aversion navigated the walkways under the shadow of her mother’s magic.
Her mother, before her death, granted her blood, blood from the Melehid family. Unlike the Ululo, the Melehids still kept their batpony origins rather than fully-transformed Vamponies. Shadow-magic was in her capability and the Ululo household, having been so willfully dependent on blood-magic for so many centuries, were unable to transcend it.
As the shadows finally subsided, brushed off them like a veil, the two found themselves in the dungeon corridors.
“So...” Aversion said, taking in the dark nothingness of the Vampony dungeon, dreading whatever lay behind any door he saw “Which door would it be?”
Rue was staring at a high door of rusty, flesh-colored steel with bizarre runes that were bleeding copiously. Faint screams and groans from Luna knew where were emanating not from behind the door but seemingly from the door itself.
Behind, the sound of powerful thumps and a ghostly mechanical murmur grew louder and louder.
“Well...” the Vampony mare said flatly “Probably this one...but I wish it wasn’t.”
Sighing the two raised their weapons, prepared spells and after a short count, threw open the door.
The Eligo Calque stood rigid in mid-air inches from the ceiling.
Around it was a slow but mighty tornado of winding sickly yellows, reds and greens, all the colors of sepsis, from which ghostly skulls, hands and screaming mouths reached out blindly in the swirling matter.
Aversion and Rue stared.
“Well...we found it.”
“It’s just standing there...” Aversion murmured “...menacingly.”
“Should we take it?”
“You tell me! This is the first time I’ve ever seen this thing.”
“Sorry, I just...feel it should be harder than this.” Rue checked her sides, spread her wings and hovered up. The twister didn’t touch her. It made way for her like river-water. Aversion kept watch.
He heard a scraping along the stone floor and the air seemed to warm.
Not in a natural way. it felt like a rash or bruise spreading across his body.
Bubbling.
Growling.
Rue’s voice brought him out of his fear as she held the calque high, the tornado subsiding.
“Got it!”
“Got you!”
The twister’s eerie green glow had drained all other light from the room. With it gone, the full-figure of a hidden predator was revealed.
Rue was clasped by a vine-like set of claws, pulsing like each joint in the limbs contained a beating heart.
The Vampony screamed, her shadow-magic diminished, as she flung across the room. Aversion caught her in mid-air, stood her back up and both drew their blades and spells before them.
A creature out of one’s nightmares stood before them. A mass of muscle without skin, grey and ulcerous with bright red tentacles writhing across its shoulders. One forearm was trailing along the ground, twice as long as the other, the hand. A face crammed between a furrowed forehead and a swollen jaw of tusks stared madly.
Aversion stared at the beast, dumbfounded.
“What the bucking hay is that?!”
“Your guess is as good as mine!” Rue answered.
The face leered, half its lip twisted into one side of the crooked jaw of tusks, the other side independent of its mouth.
“Oh, you wound me, Monardaruta.” his voice, like bubbling oil, sounded oddly tender “You do not recognize your own kin?”
Rue blinked, then stared in horror.
“Uncle Orculus?!”
“Changed somewhat, but for the better, would you not agree?”
“That thing used to be a pony?!” Aversion squawked.
“Well...close enough to one anyway.”
“I did what your father never could!” the beast spat “Hiding himself away, sipping berry juice, living among the livestock! I used his little toy to bring our kind back to the top of the food-chain!”
“And for that, you had him hunted down and my mother killed?” Rue screamed.
“We all must make sacrifices for our kind.” Orculus pointed to the Calque “That was your father’s.” His hand hovered over his mutated form “This was mine.” His hand then coursed with the same septic colors as the tornado swelled around it as his grin grow large enough to nearly tear the side of his face open.
“And this is yours!”
“Hey, plot-hole!”
The sound of breaking stone deafened the three in the room as the figure of Abstraction, followed by the full measure of his sword, crashed through the wall. He was followed by bright blue unicorn and Neolith. Another part in the stone wall broke open as Abundo’s hammer found its mark.
“Rejoice, blessed flock! Your slavery under the blood-drinking ab-equines ends to-”
He disappeared under Orculus’s fist.
There was silence.
Then the monster’s hand steadily pushed back as Abundo snarled behind his hammer.
“Ends...Today!”
Orculus grave a cry of pain as his hand disappeared under the hammer, crushed between the rock and the brazen head.
“Interrupting a priest of the Hasbrethren in the midst of proclamation is an act of blasphemy!” the cantankerous priest roared.
Behind them, a flash of white light filled the room as a crystal mage of lapis lazuli and a hulking, shaggy-haired earth pony in bear hide materialized in the room.
“The courtyard is clear. The castle is ours!” A white coated and wine-red maned Earth pony stallion thundered.
“Orculus iz Ululo, you are hereby ordered to surrender.” a tall unicorn mare, lithe and deep-indigo in coat with a long, trailing white mane called “You and your kin will be judged fairly.”
The monster gave a hiss of fury and reached for the Eligo Calque.
Rue was on it first.
The device gave a deafening clang as the Vamponies’ blood-red claws locked onto it, pulling in opposite directions.
“Give it to me, wretched filly!” Orculus snarled “Your father would have us hide away! I will give us the respect we deserve, our place above the heavens! Your father cannot protect you or any of us!”
As Rue was dragged forward, closer to her monstrous uncle, she reached a free forehoof behind her head and pulled some form of pin out of her mane.
“He can still protect me...from you...and your toy!”
Raising it high and jamming it into the device, Rue grabbed it with both hooves as the Eligo Calque shook and screamed, light beams waving in all directions.
Orculus’s distended hand shook and broke apart as the energy from the breaking Calque sucked away what it given him, along with everything else.
“What have you done?!” His screams filled the castle as his body disassembled into countless scraps, holding their place until, one after the other, they disappeared into the nether.
“What have youuuaaaarrrrggghh!”
“Rue!” Aversion yelled “Let go of the Calque, we’re getting out of here!”
At this, Rue slowly turned to the one stallion who ever trusted her and spoke, tears of blood appearing in the corner of her eyes.
“I...don’t think I can.”
Aversion and Abstraction gave a look of horror.
“Wh-what do you mean, Rue?”
“It...It’s not letting go!” Rue answered remorsefully as she gave her forehoof a tug, the energy pulse on the Calque fragments forcing her grip tight “If I let go, we’re all dead! The magic in this thing, it’ll destroy this whole island, maybe even half of Equestria, maybe the world itself! I can’t let it implode!”
“But Rue-”
“It is worth my life, Aversion! Nothing else counts...” she sniffed, her cry heard over the surging magical din “Thank you...thank you for making me more than a monster...I’m sorry it has to end so soon, right when we were getting along so well.”
“Rue...”
“Just go! Please!”
“No.” Rue looked up, stunned, as Abstraction stood before here, holding his own forehoof over the floating fragments.
Aversion stared.
“Abstraction! Let go!”
“Not happening.” The unicorn tensed himself “You’re one of the best things to ever happen to my friend there and I’m not letting either of you throw it away!”
“You don’t have the power!” Rue screamed as the din grew louder “It’ll rip you apart and keep on spreading!”
Abstraction sighed.
“I was afraid you’d say that...” He craned his neck around “Are you with me?”
Eyes turned. Minds were made.
Five members of the Dark Horse Squad waded forward as the magic surge grew wilder and wilder, shielding their eyes and reaching out with their forehooves, holding the fragments in place.
“The Hasbrood watch over those who give their lives for the good of many.” Abundo declared, his voice shaking.
“What are you doing?!” Aversion yelled “Let go! For Luna’s sake, let go! You’ll all die!”
“Lad...” The white-coated grunted, “A pony does not join the Dark Horse if they are not prepared for death!”
“We are as precious stones in death...” The tall unicorn prayed “Buried for many ages but not broken...and still bright.”
“We’ve got this...” Neolith said boldly “Somehow I always know I’d die under falling stone...not the worst way to go.”
“Tell the Lord Commander to pull his troops back as far as he can!” The bright blue pony ordered “Today, we are more than shadows. Today, Aversion...We are shooting stars!”
Abstraction lowered his head. “Tell Lyra…I love her.”
As his friend got dragged away by Rue, Abstraction’s eyes became small as the light grew brighter and brighter. “Oh no…” It were his last words before it exploded and everything became black.
With a groan, he came to, blinking several times before getting up. Abstraction held his head as he tried to remember what happened but his mind stayed blank. Looking around, he found himself in a desert and started to wander aimlessly through it.