Luna rubbed lavender lotion into my aching flank, the muscles slowly loosening up under her touch.
“That feels really good,” I groaned, and she put more of her weight into it, practically pressing her whole body against mine while she rubbed my cutie mark.
“You have quite a bit of tension in your hips,” Luna said. “Perhaps we need to try a new type of physical therapy?”
“Did you have something in mind?” I asked, looking back at her and smirking.
“That depends,” Luna’s gaze lingered over my body. I could feel her half-lidded eyes roaming like she was tracing along my muscles with her soothing, cool magic. “Part of you just realized this is a dream and now you’re wondering if this is the real Princess Luna or if you’re just having a dream with her in it~”
“I, uh--” I blinked a few times. Oh no.
Luna leaned down to breathe in my ear, her voice low and husky. “And now, you’re wondering what would happen if this isn’t the real Princess Luna and she finds out what you’ve been dreaming about~”
I screamed and tried to run, jump, and teleport all at once. None of it worked, and I just ended up tangled up in the bedsheet. And since I’d managed to half-cast a teleport spell in my sleep, the sheet was also on fire.
Some incredibly wise pony decided that this was the perfect moment to knock on my door.
“ONE SECOND!” I shouted, stomping on the sheet and trying to put it out and politely make my way to the door at the same time.
“Sunset, are you okay?” Flash Sentry opened the door and looked inside. “Is the room on fire?”
“No,” I lied.
“Why is the room on fire?”
“It isn’t!” I yelled, opening the balcony door and throwing the sheets out the window before they could catch anything else on fire. They fluttered down like a kite, and vanished like a kite that was on fire.
“There’s an alarm,” Flash continued. “What did you do? Did you burn down part of the palace?”
“No! I was sleeping! I haven’t started fires in my sleep since I was a filly!”
“...You start fires in your sleep?”
“It was a phase! Lots of unicorns have that problem when they’re foals!”
“Stop stalling and let me in!” snapped somepony unpleasant and scowling hard enough to make Flash Sentry flinch away. You might be wondering how I knew they were scowling, and I could tell you that I saw the death rays projecting from their eyes reflecting off his armor, but the truth is that when Sirocco shoved the door open to look her face had the wrinkles and hard edges of a lifetime of scowling compressed into just a few minutes.
That said, even the fact her face was carved out of disapproving granite didn’t mean she didn’t also look surprised to see me.
“You’re here,” she said. She sounded like she’d missed a step in a dance.
“Yes?” I said, just as confused but probably for different reasons. “Where else would I be?”
“Your guard was outside of the Princess’s room. When you weren’t there, I assumed you’d escaped and caused the current catastrophe.” She made an annoyed sound deep in her throat. “I suppose this is a rare instance where I happen to be wrong.”
“I asked him to keep an eye on Princess Shahrazad,” I yawned. It wasn’t a real yawn, I just wanted to try and look casual. Like I hadn’t just set the room on fire. “So what’s this big disaster? A critical lack of coffee?”
“The dead are rising from their graves,” Sirocco said.
“...The dead are…” I started, hesitating. I couldn’t have heard her right.
“Rising. From their graves.” Sirocco narrowed her eyes. “And you had nothing to do with it. Interesting.”
“How is that even possible? Is there a necromancer?” I started pacing, trying to think. It was strictly illegal to create undead abominations in Equestria, so I’d naturally only tried it once or twice before deciding having a spooky half-rotten servant as smart as your average dog wasn’t worth going to prison if I got caught.
“One would assume so,” Sirocco agreed.
“Okay,” I muttered, walking in circles. “Did they bring them back all at once? Maybe they just did a few at a time and hid them until they were ready. There are enough basements and empty buildings to hide a dozen armies here…”
“You seem to have put a lot of thought into this.”
“It’s what I would do if I was-” I caught myself. “I mean, look, everypony thinks about how they’d take over the world when they’re a filly! It’s normal!”
Flash groaned and facehooved and I wasn’t sure why because I was objectively right. Anypony who’d never at least thought about how they’d conquer a city was unambitious or spoiled.
“You have an interesting definition of normal,” Sirocco said. “But it seems the dead only began rising up at some time in the night.”
I nodded. So that would have been a few hours after court. A few hours… after I gave a grieving mother a box holding a wish with very unclear instructions. Add in a little time for her to get home and actually open it up and it was right on schedule to be…
All my fault.
Horseapples.
“You know, I should help out,” I said, starting to sweat. It wasn’t because of the heat. “I’m an expert in basically every type of magic.”
“I’m not entirely convinced that your presence will not make things worse,” Sirocco retorted. “You are an unstable element.”
“Radium is an unstable element. I’m a professional.”
“Ah yes. Puns when the city is overrun by the undead. I can see why Princess Celestia made you her student. Purely for humor.”
“That’s a weird way to say ‘oh Sunset, you’re so well-educated I’d love to have you along so you can solve this magical problem!’”
“The Aretic Order is fully capable of dealing with this,” Sirocco countered.
“Hear me out - you want to keep an eye on me. I want to make sure you don’t go around murdering ponies. It’ll work out better for both of us if we don’t fight about this.”
I could practically see the gears turning in Sirocco’s head while she tried to work out how I was scamming her. She was the kind of naturally suspicious pony that I probably should have been with all the untrustworthy types surrounding me. If I had to deal with ponies like Arch or whatever was going on with the royal family as a career, I could see myself turning into a cautious, suspicious mare like her.
“Fine,” she said. “Speaking in my official capacity, I am pleased to have a professional to assist with the current crisis, especially one from our allies in Equestria.”
“And unoffically?”
She turned and walked out. “You don't want to know. We’re going to be working together, if briefly. I’d prefer not to be rude.”
“When you told me about hordes of the shambling dead, this isn’t really what I pictured,” I said, looking past the suspiciously well-constructed barricades to the animated corpses beyond. I wasn’t exactly an expert in necromancy, but I knew the basics. Generally speaking, a corpse was a house with nobody home. A train with no conductor. If it’s left alone, it’s harmless. Necromancy is the art of shoving something in there to make things work.
The most common type of undead were zombies. That was sort of a wide group, since there were a ton of variation in zombies, but the thread they had in common was that they were a total failure. The body would rot, they weren’t smart enough to do anything useful, and there was nothing remaining of the pony they used to be. If you messed up making some more advanced form of the undead, that’s what you got. A lot of them were so badly made they’d collapse on their own after a few hours.
Now the big thing about zombies is that they don’t spread. They’re not a plague. They’re just kind of sad. If there was a necromancer strong enough to make an entire army of the stupid things, they had to have enough talent to do something better with their time.
“How do we destroy them?” Sirocco asked. She was probably only asking me because she thought I was some dark force of evil with special insight, but considering I’d been thinking about necrobiology for a while in silence, maybe she wasn’t too far off.
“They’re not making any kind of coordinated effort,” I said. “They’re not even doing anything.” That wasn’t entirely true. They were milling around and it looked aimless at first, but if you watched them for a while it was almost like a crowded marketplace or a festival in slow motion. Some of them were ‘talking’ to each other in grunts and growls. I swear a couple of them were trying to dance. A few were miming taking drinks from unseen bottles and eating invisible food.
“They’re causing a panic,” Sirocco said. “Even if they’re not hurting anypony right now, it’s going to cause a riot if nothing is done.”
“They’re already barricaded off. Celestia always told me that you need to examine a problem instead of just jumping into it.” I'd never listened but she'd definitely said it a few times.
“So you know it will end here?” Sirocco pressed. “You know that they will not suddenly become violent? You’re sure that they pose no threat? You are absolutely certain that by tomorrow whatever is causing this will not spill out over the whole city?”
“Well, I… no,” I admitted. “I don’t know any of that.”
“I am responsible to the living, not the dead,” Sirocco said. “Again, how do we destroy them?”
I sighed and rubbed my face. “The easiest way is to destroy the heart or head,” I said. “Fire would work, but…”
“But?”
“But they’re in the middle of the city. I’ve had way too many ponies yell at me about how many fires I cause. If they get set on fire and then start running around because we find the last little bit of awareness they’ve got in them, we could have dozens of moving bonfires spreading the flames everywhere.”
“Noted,” Sirocco said, with a nod. She raised a hoof and one of her ponies put a crossbow in her hoof. She took careful aim with a weapon clearly designed for a unicorn to manipulate with magic and fired. The steel bolt slammed into a zombie’s chest and… the zombie didn’t even seem to notice.
“You have to hit the heart,” I explained. “It’s not an easy shot. A pony’s heart is sort of…”
“I hit the heart,” Sirocco said.
“It’s a tiny target.”
“I have had a considerable amount of practice,” she said. She lowered the crossbow and I would have offered to recharge it for her, but she drew the steel wire back by hoof with seemingly no effort. Not going to lie, that was a little scary. She fired again, and hit the same zombie, this time putting the bolt through its rotting gourd of a head.
The zombie turned slightly and clumsily swatted at its own face like it was trying to get rid of an annoying fly. Frustratingly, it didn’t die.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The… the seat of the animus has to be in the head or heart. That’s just how zombies work! Unless…”
“Unless what?” Sirocco asked, passing the crossbow back to her soldier.
“Well, zombies aren’t the only type of undead. They’re just the most common, and if you have some kind of big magic accident they’re what you get basically a hundred percent of the time.” I motioned to the shamblers. “There are a couple types of undead that look like zombies but aren’t the same.”
“Such as?” Sirocco asked, waiting patiently.
“Ghouls look mostly like zombies, but they’re better preserved and have to consume the flesh of corpses. Which, um, they’re not doing. Revenants are possessed by a need for revenge or to complete some task in life, but…”
“I find it unlikely ponies have returned from the grave for the purpose of having a small party,” Sirocco said.
I nodded in agreement. “This isn’t like anything I’ve read about before.” That didn’t mean I wasn’t pretty sure about the cause of all of it, but there was a big difference between knowing the cause and understanding the effect.
“And are you only able to contend with foes whose biography you’ve memorized?” Sirocco asked.
I frowned and tried not to glare at her. “Fine. You stay here, I’m going to try something.”
Before she could say anything, I hopped past the barricade with help from one spell to throw me into the air and another to control my fall. It was showing off, but when somepony starts talking trash about your skills you have to show off.
I landed among the undead. The smell wasn’t as bad as I feared, even this close to them. Most of these corpses were old. Really old. They were dried out and desiccated, with only a faint smell like when you leave a bowl of fruit somewhere for a week and come back to everything starting to turn brown and soft.
The nearest of them turned to me and stared with milky, unfocused eyes for a few long seconds before getting bored and going back to what it had been doing.
“I think it’s safe,” I said, carefully taking a few steps through the crowd. “They’re not interested in me.”
“Was it necessary to throw yourself into danger just to test that?” Sirocco asked.
“It was the fastest way and didn’t put anypony else at risk,” I said, with a shrug. “At least we know we don’t have to worry about being eaten alive.”
“As you say,” Sirocco agreed. “But you are no closer to finding the source.”
“I have an idea about that,” I said. “So the animus, the animating force for the undead, that should have been disrupted when you shot the one zombie in the head. The fact it’s still moving means the animus isn’t located there.”
I started casting, improvising a spell on the fly. A lot of ponies think it’s hard to invent a new spell, but I never thought it was all that hard. Making a spell efficient is hard. Making it flawless is almost impossible. But if you’re willing to make it sloppy and leaky you can get away with practically anything.
I sent out a pulse, a ring of illusion magic crossed with a tiny bit of necromancy and a little divination. It washed through the undead near me. For an instant I caught a glimpse of what they looked like when they were alive, like a washed-out photo where the flash is too strong and all you see is highlight and shadow. It hung around them like a badly-fitting set of clothes.
It faded, but a trace was left in the air, a twist like cobwebs leading away from the horde.
“What’s that?” Sirocco asked.
“I cast a spell to trace the animating force,” I explained. “It’s external to them. We can follow the strings to figure out where they’re coming from.”
“Ah. Now that, I understand.” Sirocco jumped over the barricade easily. “I will go with you. The rest of the Order will continue maintaining the blockade to ensure none of them escape.”
“Right,” I said. “It’ll be safer if it’s only the two of us. Trying to move an army through might… well, I don’t know what it would make them do, and that’s probably dangerous enough.”
Sirocco looked up. “Your spell has already ended.”
I cast it again, making everything visible. The web of connections left hanging over us only lasted a few seconds.
“Looks like we’ll have to recast every once in a while to get our bearings,” I said. “Let’s pick one of them and see where the thread goes.”
Sirocco glanced around and pointed at the one she’d shot, a stallion with a faded blue coat drawn tight around his bones. I cast the spell and tried to focus on just the stream coming out of him like he was a fish hooked on a line. A tweak to the way I cast the spell and that single thread lasted longer than the rest.
“Excellent,” Sirocco said. “You are indeed an asset, Miss Shimmer.”
“I think we can…” I hesitated, then gently pushed the moving corpse. It was able to walk, stumbling with the dazed obliviousness of a particularly dull animal. “If we lead it along like this we can make sure we don’t lose the trail.”
Sirroco nodded and followed me as we traced the winding line through the streets until it went inside a building. I hesitated at the doorstep.
“This isn’t a morgue or anything, right?” I asked. Sirocco shook her head and I pushed the door open from a safe distance, just in case something jumped out with a mouth full of sharp teeth.
Instead, inside was just soft light and quiet. I swallowed and walked in. There were candles around the room that had been allowed to burn for a long time, some of them already out and the rest running low.
The thin trace of magic was faint now, but I could still see where it was leading. There was a mare collapsed in her bed, sweating and feverish.
“Look at this,” I whispered.
“Is she the necromancer?” Sirocco asked. I stepped between them just in case her life was on the line depending on how I answered.
“She’s a victim,” I said. “Her magic and her life force are being used to animate one of those corpses.”
“Hostages, then?” Sirocco asked. “What happens if the monster is destroyed?”
“It would probably stop the drain on her, but I’m not sure how to actually destroy them.”
“You mentioned fire, yes?” Sirocco said.
“Yes but…” I held up a hoof. “This is delicate and dangerous. If her life force is being used to animate one of those undead, damaging the body might make the drain faster. Setting them on fire might just kill everypony connected to them.”
Sirocco paused and I could see it on her face. She was thinking about doing it anyway.
“It might even make things worse,” I said. “I’m pretty sure some of these undead are connected to each other. If she dies that way, she might come back as one of them and start draining somepony else.”
Sirocco clicked her tongue in annoyance. “And you’re sure she’s not the necromancer?”
“One pony’s life couldn’t stretch so thin it would cover all those bodies,” I said.
“Perhaps, but it does seem she knew the deceased,” Sirocco pointed at a photograph, faded by time and sunlight. One of the young ponies was clearly the mare tossing and turning in fever dreams. The other was a stallion with a blue coat, and maybe if he was a lot thinner and a little more dead, he’d be a match for the zombie whose trail we’d followed here.
“That can’t be a coincidence…”
“Is there anything you can do to sever the connection between them?” Sirocco asked. “I doubt she will last long otherwise.”
“There is one thing. Maybe.” I wasn’t an expert in necromancy. I was pretty good at killing monsters, though. “This might get messy. I’ve never done it before.”
Dark magic is, at its core, magic where somepony else pays the price. Most of the time it’s just like eating dinner at a fancy place and skipping out on the bill, forcing somepony else to cover your tab. The other option was finding some other way to fiddle with the accounting. Using blood or life energy or something else like you’re bartering with the laws of the universe.
What I did was more like jamming my hoof into somepony else’s pockets and stealing their wallet. I reached into the mare’s wellspring and found the part where the dark energy was sprouting from. Then I yanked like I was tearing a weed out of a garden.
She gasped, eyes shooting open, and quickly settled down into a more restful sleep. The undead pony collapsed in a heap at the same moment, no more animated than the dust around it.
“What did you do?” Sirocco asked.
I was suddenly aware I’d just done something that was technically dark magic right in front of a pony that I was absolutely sure would kill a pony for using dark magic.
“I, uh,” I started, trying to find a good lie.
“That was dark magic,” Sirocco said. “Very dangerous, Miss Shimmer. Like fighting fire with fire, one often ends up burned by it.”
“Never heard that one before,” I lied.
“Do you know why the Aretic Order hunts down sources of black magic?” Sirocco asked.
“It’s not really popular anywhere. I hadn’t put a lot of thought into it.”
“A long time ago, this is what Saddle Arabia was like.” She nodded to the corpse. “There was something new every day that we had to deal with. Horrors, and beauty too, but mostly horrors. The beautiful things were fleeting, but the awful ones lingered.”
“The djinni, right?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just so. You can’t understand what it was like. Everything starts with a small thing. It is the way landslides start. A small wish, a tiny thing. Something that hurts nopony. Ponies learn to become dependent on them. Farmers stop farming, then don’t teach their foals how to tend the fields. What is the need when the crops can grow at a whim? Why build anything when it can simply be done by speaking it aloud?”
“I’ve heard this argument before about not helping ponies in need,” I pointed out. “Why help anypony instead of making them work for it?”
“Mm. All things in moderation. Helping ponies is good. Making them dependent on that help is not. It becomes a prison they cannot escape, like a drug. Wishes to fix other wishes that had gone wrong. Bigger wishes to try to fix the whole world at once. Cruel wishes just to hurt somepony. All of them made at once, the world trying to warp a thousand ways at once, and the djinni feeding on it all.”
“They’re gone now, though, so it obviously didn’t work out for them.”
“They’re gone now because we hunted them down. The Aretic Order was formed of ponies who could resist temptation, and over a thousand years ago we slew every single djinn in the world. It is very difficult to destroy an enemy that can grow stronger because you wish it to be killed, but methods were found.”
“And now you hunt down ponies?”
“We try to keep the world in order. I’m telling you this because I believe you can understand why it’s important. I want you to have the proper perspective, especially if you are going to be a lingering part of this nation.”
“All the threats really make me feel comfortable,” I snorted.
“Mm. I suppose part of me is simply annoyed that you have disrupted a stable situation.”
“Stable? Princess Shahrazad was almost assassinated!”
“Was she?” Sirocco asked. “By brightly colored killers in a very public place where she just happened to run into the Equestrian envoy?”
“Well, she... “ I hesitated.
“Can you track the source of the undead?” Sirocco asked, changing the subject before I could think too deeply or come up with a counter-argument.
“I, um, sure,” I said. I stepped outside and cast the searching spell again. Looking carefully at the webbing left in the air you could see a general drift to it. The undead and the ties they had to whatever people were animating them were like local eddies, but the whole thing was like a steam, leading back to some spring.
“That way?” Sirocco asked, looking up-stream. I nodded, even though it was behind her back, and she started following it.
Let me preface this by saying I was pretty sure about what we’d find at the end of that trail. I wasn’t stupid.
No, you know what? I was stupid. I’d given a grieving mare a box with a wish in it - and buck knows how you keep a wish inside a box - and worse than just telling her it would fix things, I hadn’t explained anything at all. I’d just put it in her hooves and hoped it would all work out for the best.
And where did that get you? Apparently it got you in the middle of an undead plague. It blew up in my face like every other big decision I'd ever had to make. That was the whole reason I'd left Canterlot in the first place. Something went wrong, I tried to fix it, and I only made it worse. The closer we got to the source of all this, the more it started to tighten up, like individual threads weaving together into cloth.
I was absolutely sure that this was all going to be my fault. If I didn’t have Sirocco breathing down my neck I’d feel a lot better about my chances of solving it. I was starting to think she wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but I’d thought that about some of Fluttershy’s animals immediately before that’d decided to sink their fangs into me.
And now I was thinking about the ponies I’d hurt just when I didn’t need a distraction.
“It isn’t the sort of place I would expect a necromancer to linger,” Sirocco said, stopping outside of one of the many nearly-identical buildings of the city. “Or perhaps it is.” She stepped to the side of the entrance. Fresh flowers were strewn in loose bundles to either side of the door.
“What is it?”
“It’s a home, but these flowers usually mean a funeral,” Sirocco said. She held one up to look at it more closely, then tossed it aside. “You go first.”
That was a surprise. “Me?”
“If there is a necromancer inside, they will respond better to somepony like you intruding on them. Perhaps you can convince them you want to help with their work, hm?” She smiled slightly. “You are dressed the part for a funeral, at least.”
“Black is-- well it is appropriate,” I admitted, tugging my cloak tighter.
“I’ll give you a few minutes. Or until you scream.” She shrugged and stepped to the side of the doorway, trampling on the offerings ponies had left there.
I walked in and tried to look as confident as I didn’t feel. I wasn’t alone. Once I pushed past the curtain over the empty doorway, dozens of blank eyes turned to look at me. They were sitting quietly in rows, like somepony had gone to the graveyard and dug up their extended family for a reunion.
Traces of that dark magic flowed between all of them and up to the front of the room. A small altar had been constructed there, probably somepony’s kitchen table, and two ponies were there, one of them speaking in low tones and the other…
Well, the other was a foal. Had been a foal. It looked just a little more alive than the other corpses. From this distance, I could almost convince myself that it was still a pony and not just a puppet. It looked at me and got the other pony’s attention. Just like I thought, it was the mother I’d seen at the palace. The one I’d tried to help.
“I wished for him to come back,” the mare said. “It’s a miracle! He’s still sick, but he’s back with me! Can you believe it?!”
She turned with a smile full of joy and eyes glowing with madness and motioned to the lifeless crowd.
“The whole family came over and they’re feeling a little under the weather, but we’re all together again!”
“You need to let him go,” I said, quietly. It felt like I was interrupting something, but it wasn’t like she was even on the same planet as the rest of us at this point. Whatever had happened it had taken its toll on her mind. “He’s not your foal anymore.”
“No!” She hissed, getting between me and her ‘son’. “I won’t let you hurt him!”
“He’s hurting you,” I said. “Please. Look at everything that’s happened -- a lot of ponies are suffering because of this. I’m sorry.”
“I won’t-- I won’t let him be taken away again,” she whispered. “Can’t you see? Everypony’s family is coming back!”
I cast a quick spell, just to make sure I was right. She was at the center of it all, like the eye in a storm. She’d brought her son back, and the spell had started feeding on other ponies. Their wishes to see their own lost loves had strengthened the spell. It was just like what Sirocco had described, chaos growing from the hunger of ponies wanting the world to change.
“But why weren’t we affected?” I mumbled.
“None of the ponies you care about are dead,” the mother said. “I can feel it. Everypony you love is still alive. You’re so lucky, but we aren’t. This is our only chance to see them again!”
“Can’t you see how many ponies are dying because of you?” I groaned.
“Don’t bother trying to explain it,” Sirocco said, marching inside and giving the ranks of the undead a displeased stare. “She’s not listening to reason. They never do, not when they’re this far gone.”
“No, I know you!” the mother gasped. “You’re that pony who goes around taking away innocent mares and stallions!”
“Sometimes, yes, the innocent get caught up in it,” Sirocco said. “Is she the caster, Miss Shimmer?”
“Yeah, but give me a while. I’m still trying to figure out how to dispel the magic. It’s not nearly as easy as it was with the first pony. That was like pulling a weed out of a garden. This is more like… trying to tame a whole forest.”
“There isn’t time for that. Every moment, more ponies die.” Sirocco stepped up to the mother, and I could see the difference between them. Sirocco was a full head taller, all tight muscle and training. The other pony was half-cowering, half-starved, just a mother out of her mind with grief.
The snap was like green wood splintering. Sirocco let the mare drop to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” she said. I don’t know if she was saying it to her or to me. I don’t even think she was really sorry. She was apologizing out of habit, not because she cared.
“You… I…”
“We will clean up the rest,” Sirocco said. She walked back to the door, over what had been undead and were now just corpses, the last vestiges of the animating force leaving them. “Go back to the palace, Sunset Shimmer, and whatever comforts you can find there.”
She walked through the curtain, leaving me alone in a room full of bodies.
I hadn’t seen it before, but on the makeshift altar next to the foal’s still form was a silver box. I couldn’t help myself. I picked it up and opened it.
Inside was a tangle of wire growing from the walls of the box itself, a dreamcatcher that could only have been shaped by magic. There was an empty space inside it, like it had been holding something whose shape seemed different every time I looked, like it couldn’t settle into one form even after being gone.
I shut the lid and shoved it in my saddlebags and managed to get to the door before I threw up.
It wasn’t a good start to the day, but it was only a prelude to how bad things were going to get.