Lex remained stonily silent as he headed south.
He could hear Aria’s hoofsteps behind him, and although he knew it wasn’t the case, he couldn’t help but imagine that she was deliberately stepping loud enough for him to hear, letting him know that she was still following him. The thought was a bitter one, washing away the recent affection he’d felt toward her and replacing it with antipathy. Sonata would have obeyed me, he thought angrily. Nosey would have obeyed me. But Aria apparently felt no particular compunction about disregarding his wishes, with neither his long list of accomplishments nor all of the things he’d done for her nor even their current relationship being sufficient to convince her that she should do what he told her as a matter of course.
It was enough to make his jaw clench, but beneath his frustration was a growing sense of anxiety. Aria had flat-out stated that she knew that he was keeping something from her, and it was quite clear now that she was intent on finding out what. And unless he figured out some way of dissuading her, she would. This summoning was his last chance to figure out a way to circumvent the Night Mare’s ultimatum, which meant that he’d need to speak candidly with whatever creature he brought forth about the sacrifice the goddess expected him to make. And when Aria overheard that…
It’s not her anger that you’re worried about though, is it? Despite their voicelessness, the words from his shadow carried a mocking overtone. You’re worried that she’ll find out the truth: that if you have to, you won’t hesitate to give her and the others up.
The gibe stung like poison, making Lex tense up so badly that he almost stumbled. But even if Aria hadn’t been there, there was no response that he could have made. As badly as he wanted to keep his relationship with the girls intact – especially now when things were finally working out – if he couldn’t find a third answer to the binary choice that he’d been given, then he’d have no other alternative but to let Aria, Nosey, and Sonata go. As deeply as he cared for them, their relationship was entirely personal, which meant that it absolutely could not be placed above the good work he was doing here.
If Lex had to choose between love or duty, the latter would win every time.
“Where are we going?” came Aria’s voice from behind him.
But Lex remained silent, still fuming over her refusal to stay behind. He heard her give an exasperated sigh, and despite the fact that he was trying so hard to find a way for them to stay together, he couldn’t help but take a measure of spiteful satisfaction at the sound of her exasperation. It served her right for being such an intrusive nuisance.
They’d nearly reached the river when Lex finally stopped, his body already aching from the brief march. But he paused for only a few seconds before turning and heading west, toward Vanhoover. Fortunately, they’d gone far enough south that they were well beyond the range of the few campfires that were still burning, and nopony seemed to notice them.
The walk into Vanhoover was slow, despite Lex’s best efforts. The city proper was a considerable distance from the camp, and while Lex knew he was in no condition to make such a journey, he forced himself to keep moving. Since there had been no signs of ghoul activity as of the battle, and the outflow of ponies that had managed to survive the city’s fall had slowed to a trickle in the last few days, Vanhoover was the best venue for what he was about to attempt. Its distance from the camp and the intervening buildings would serve to keep everypony away so that there was no one to watch, nor potentially interrupt, the ritual. Or at least, almost everypony, he thought bitterly, glancing back at where Aria was still doggedly following him.
That proved to be a mistake, however, as taking his eye off of the starlit path in front of him caused him to miss the small stone in his way. His hoof caught against it, and while he normally would have had no trouble catching himself, in his current state Lex was unable to correct his balance in time, sending him crashing to the ground. The fall was only mildly painful, but the blow to his pride was severe, and Lex’s face burned with humiliation at knowing that Aria had witnessed him suffer such an indignity. Expecting to hear her snide laughter at any moment, he immediately started to get up…only to find that his body refused to cooperate, his lungs and legs both feeling like they were on fire as he again tried, and failed, to rise.
But the expected laughter didn’t come. Instead, Aria reached out with her hooves, picking him up and helping him to stand. Her unexpected assistance did nothing to improve Lex’s mood. “Oh get over yourself,” Aria snorted in response to the dark look he gave her. But her expression softened a second later. “Besides, I still owe you for the last time we came here, remember? I scraped my tail and you healed it.”
“Hmph.” Lex’s answer came with a sullen look, but he didn’t push her away…even if he petulantly told himself that he would have if he’d had the strength to do so.
They continued on like that until they made it into the city. By that point Lex had regained enough strength to walk unassisted, leading Aria deeper into Vanhoover until they finally came to a plaza of sufficient size for him to perform the summoning. “Conjure a light,” he ordered Aria curtly, the first words he’d spoken to her since they’d left the station. The light from the stars was barely sufficient to see their way around; for actually holding a conversation with whatever he summoned, more illumination would be necessary.
Aria rolled her eyes, but chanted for a moment, touching a hoof to a crumpled tin can lying on the ground. Immediately, it began to shine like a torch, bathing the area around them in light. But the edges of the plaza remained cloaked in gloom, the connecting streets and alleys leading off into darkness that seemed even deeper now. Lex’s own shadow, previously invisible in the darkness, was now markedly obvious, falling perpendicular to the shadows around it.
Lex, however, was less concerned about that than he was with what was about to happen, and not just because of Aria’s presence. The barbed wire around his leg had continued to gradually grow tighter, to the point where it was now a source of constant pain. Time, he knew, was running out. He looked at Aria one last time, trying to think of some last-ditch method of preventing her from hearing the exchange that would happen shortly…but just like before, he came up short. She’s going to find out, he realized with a sinking feeling.
Aria seemed to be thinking the same thing, giving him a defiant look. “If you’re going to tell me to take a hike, you can forget it.”
Already depleted both physically and emotionally, Lex couldn’t even find the strength to stay angry at her any longer, instead resigning himself to his secret being found out. “Just make sure no one interrupts the ritual,” he ordered her woodenly.
“Fine.”
With no further preamble, Lex raised a foreleg – the one without the Night Mare’s ever-constricting wire – and began to gesture and chant.
This ritual required far less power than the one he used to call upon the Night Mare herself, and so required commensurately less time to enact. But as he called out the words in the proper sequence, making the matching gesticulations, Lex could feel himself struggling to control and direct the ambient energies into the proper configuration. Each breath made his chest ache, and his foreleg felt like it had weights attached to it. Every minute that went by was like an hour, threatening to drag his consciousness down into a hazy morass of lethargy. It was only the absolute knowledge of the consequences of failure – not only in terms of what he’d lose if he couldn’t evade the Night Mare’s demand, but also how the ritual would produce unknown results if he miscast it – that kept him focused, making sure to chant every syllable exactly, each gesture precisely. Finally, after what felt like hours of casting but he knew couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes, he finished.
The final word of his incantation had barely left Lex’s lips when he felt the accumulated power suddenly fulminate outward. The effect was dizzying, as if gravity had suddenly reoriented itself in a different direction for a split-second, and out of his peripheral vision Lex saw Aria sway a little, also feeling the effect. A guarded look crossed her face as she glanced around, stepping closer to him. “Did it work?”
The words sounded almost muffled somehow, as though the very air had become reluctant to allow for any noise. But Lex knew it was an aftereffect of the ritual, caused by the fabric of space stretching and snapping back as a consequence of the brief planar conjunction that he’d just created. “It worked.”
Aria looked around again. “So where is…whatever you called?”
Lex was wondering that too, but suspected that they’d find out soon. “Just wait.”
Aria clearly wasn’t happy with that answer. She opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out there was a sound of…something. It was too brief and too faint to identify, but one glance at Aria’s face made it clear that she’d heard it too. Then it came again. Then again, and by now the sound was recognizable.
It was hoofsteps.
Something was approaching them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lex saw a brief flicker, and turned toward it, with Aria positioning herself slightly behind him as she did the same. There, in the alleyway furthest from the light, a brief flicker lit up the darkness, a small burst of flames appearing as though someone had just struck a flint to a tinder, the fires guttering too fast to provide any hint as to what was causing them. But another flame appeared a half-second later, and Lex realized that they were occurring concurrently with the hoofsteps, as though whatever was heading toward them were causing flames to spark with every step they took.
It was clearly meant to be intimidating, and it was the very recognition of that fact that made Lex snort. Parlor tricks, he thought derisively, his eyes alighting in irritation.
The hoofsteps grew closer, each one still accompanied by a burst of yellow and orange flames, until they neared the mouth of the alley. But now there was another sound as well, a soft continuous crinkling, as though paper were being crumpled into a ball. That was enough to make Lex’s brow furrow slightly. The hoofsteps were obvious, and the sparks were clearly legerdemain; what was that other sound?
But there was no time to contemplate it as the sounds and sparks suddenly came to a halt just before they reached the edge of the light. A moment later, a voice slid out of the darkness. “A red horn,” it rasped. “Green and purple eyes. An incongruous shadow.” The voice, clearly male, was gravelly, as though its owner had gargled acid. “To think that I’d be summoned by Lex Legis himself.”
Lex tensed at that, but it was Aria who spoke up, looking at him with a nervous expression. “How does that thing know your name?”
“Oh, it’s on everyone’s lips where I come from,” the shadow-clad creature laughed, and the sound was like sheets of sandpaper being rubbed together. “You’re the one who received such generous boons from Our Dark Lady, and yet now you’re falling out of her favor, and are on the verge of losing everything.”
Again, Aria was the one who responded. “What does that mean?”
She could have been talking to either of them, but Lex wasn’t interested in rehashing how he’d gotten to where he was. “Enough,” he ordered, his eyes locked onto the darkness in the alley where the creature he’d summoned was hiding. “I brought you here to answer my questions, not tell me what I already know. Now,” his eyes narrowed, and his voice dropped to a threatening rumble, “step into the light and identify yourself.”
Another coarse laugh came from the darkness. “If you wish.” A second later the creature stepped into the plaza. Lex heard Aria gasp at the sight, and although he kept his reaction tightly controlled, he couldn’t blame her for her reaction to the horror in front of them.
Wingless and hornless, the equinoid that emerged was twice as tall as Lex and white from head to hoof. But nopony could have said that the creature resembled Princess Celestia in the slightest. Where the alicorn’s coloration came from her flawless coat, this creature’s entire body was one huge white-encrusted scab. Not one patch of unblemished skin could be seen anywhere, and as it moved the source of the crinkling they’d heard earlier became clear: it was the creature’s scabrous tissue flexing and flaking as it moved, bits of it falling off only to regenerate immediately thereafter.
The grisly state of its body was only heightened by how stark the rest of it was. No mane adorned its head, nor did its tail have any hair. Its eyes were a solid orange, lacking irises or pupils entirely. Nor could a cutie mark be seen on its flanks, though whether it had never possessed one or it was simply covered by the full-body scabbing was impossible to tell. But there was clearly more to the creature than its revolting exterior; its every exhalation produced smoke from its nostrils, as if its stomach were a furnace, and flames continued to spark with every step it took.
“My name is Harrowing Ordeal,” announced the creature with a wide grin, clearly enjoying their reactions, “and I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be here.”