It’s the late afternoon, and Gem is in the castle dungeons. Not locked up this time, although at this point she would prefer the peace and quiet of a cell. No, she discovered that there was an indoors training area down here, practically unused during the summer. Ponnequins with various kinds of armor are lining the walls of the wide open room, near the entrance there are boxes with weapons, and several practice targets for ranged weapons hang on the wall in the back.
She wanted some peace and quiet, so she informed Two and the others to leave her alone unless something serious happened, and went down here to meditate on the recent events in hopes to figure out something she missed or, failing that, to simply calm down and relax.
A sword flies past her head, and casually slashes the air. No, she sure wouldn’t use this even for defense. Her telekinesis isn’t the greatest for anything other than carrying things. She certainly wouldn’t be able to fight anyway, not that she would ever want to. She’s a changeling. It is in her power to end fights or disputes without violence. Holes know changelings caused enough pain already throughout the history.
But maybe… just maybe…
She stands up, and examines the ponnequins, namely one with a harness of two leather belts crossed over its chest, seemingly with dozens of tiny loops for crossbow bolts. With fresh curiosity, she tries it on, fiddling with its adjustible straps. While made for a Royal Guard, it eventually fits Gem’s clop dream, zebra-proportioned changeling body well. In the end, she adjusts her streaked mane made loose by pulling the harness over her head.
Vials could fit into those holes instead of crossbow bolts, and there are tons of incapacitating potions she could mix with the use of her shapeshifting. Those would be light enough for her to throw with some accuracy. A method of defense that would minimize the chances of her irreparably harming someone, and still give her the freedom to blast some bloodthirsty monster if needed.
Out of nowhere, a flash of blue light opens a circular gateway hanging in the air by the practice targets, making Gem jump and shuffle backwards to the entrance. At the first sight of the greying white leg stepping out, she turns and bolts.
She hears the click of the door lock before she can reach it. Immediately, she spits at the locking mechanism, but the door is thick, double-winged, and the lock is made of heavy metal. Melting it is going to take some time.
The hoofsteps grow closer, and she turns to face her enemy. Apparently, she needs time she doesn’t have.
Star Trail is more muscular and looks younger than before, but the hatred etched on his face and his overall looks are still there. If there is a good side to this, it’s that he’s not wearing any armor, or levitating a weapon-
Nevermind, scratch that, a sword from the crates floats over to him immediately.
Note to self - never again step into a room that can be used as a combat arena.
“CRYO, TWO, ELEVEN, STAR TRAIL IS BACK!” she lets out a mental scream to reach anyone. There’s no answer. In fact, she can’t sense anything outside of the training room.
Star Trail notices her panicked look from side to side, and laughs.
“Isolation spell, bug. No one will save you this time. Not your insect friends, not Bright Star, no one!”
Gem frowns. Still, an unarmed changeling like her is far from being defenseless. She just needs time. Hardening her chitin against glancing blows, she starts circling around Star Trail who gives the sword few practice swings to measure its weight in comparison to his lighter paladin weapon.
Gem is looking Star Trail straight in the eyes, her standard shifting and shimmering colors digging deep into his mind to make him suggestive. The air grows heavy with pheromones as she breathes out. All the non-obvious hypnotic properties she learned from Comfort are aimed at Star Trail.
Star Trail breathes in, narrows his eyes, and attacks.
Gem jumps and rolls to the side, immediately getting back on all fours as Star Trail is already above her faster than his flying sword. He kicks her like a raging bull, making her fly to the opposite wall. Has he ever been this strong?
Thankfully, the kicked distance only means Gem finally has time to stand up, because her carapace is more than enough to shrug off impacts like that. Behind Star Trail, on the other side of the room, she sees the lock smolder. First she needs a minute at most, and then to get past him.
“HELP!” she screams, more to fake lack of concentration rather than hoping that her voice would breach the isolaton spell. Star Trail jumps towards her as expected, his sword cleaving the air again.
Sparks and half of the broken sword hit Gem’s back as he hacks at the wall. While her avoiding the weapon works, her attempt to run past, however, ends as he punches her to the side with strength that makes her legs twist and send her tripping on the floor.
Star Trail straddles her belly, and punches her in the face.
“No one will save you this time, monster,” he repeats in a hiss, the broken sword hovering above Gem’s head.
He is too strong, and she knows that if she softens her carapace at the wrong time to escape, he’ll easily snap her neck. Maybe she should bite him, since her subtler hypnosis methods don’t seem to be working. Her stomach revolves at the thought. However, her course of action is clear.
Straining against him holding her shoulders down, she waits for him to lean closer to gloat again…
...and kisses him, forcing him to swallow as much of her saliva as she can.
She gets a fraction of a second before he bites down on her long tongue, and rips it off.
Gem’s scream of pain is cut short by him punching her in the neck, leaving a small crack in her carapace. He instantly presses his both hooves against it, and starts grinding her against the floor, chitin creaking and… failing against his strength and weight.
“I am undead, bug. Your mind tricks don’t work on me,” he growls, and with a twist of his hoof, Gem’s chitin cracks. Her eyes roll back in agony as the broken shards dig into the soft flesh of her neck underneath, and her windpipe gets crushed. While he could easily push his hoof through her neck and likely rip her head off, he doesn’t, “I won’t kill you quickly, you don’t deserve that. You will squirm and I will enjoy you choking to death under me. Maybe I’ll even have time for some fun,” he raises both his hooves again, shuffles back a little, and slams them against her chest. Her chitin collapses as well as the ribs underneath. Her shredded lungs fill with blood immediately, turning Gem’s still defiant flailing into uncontrollable twitching.
All Gem hears through the rushing of blood in her ears is Star Trail’s laughter. She doesn’t hear the door slam open after a powerful kick, nor the minotaur warcry following it.
Star Trail scowls, raising his foreleg to end Gem before having to face the intruder. A warhammer half his weight thrown with the force of a freight train straight up sweeps him off of Gem. A ponnequin kicked his way follows, not harming him but also not giving him time to recuperate.
When he sweeps the ponnequin out of the way with his foreleg, a hand reaches out to him. Fingers grab his horn and twist it off along with a punch of a steel gauntlet to the face which knocks some of his teeth out. He raises his hooves, unable to feel pain but still dazed by the unreleting assault.
A leg kicks him against the wall in the next moment, and Star Trail completely misses the previously thrown warhammer raised by the minotaur again as if it was a one-handed weapon, and then going down on his head.
Anvil kicks Star Trail’s headless body for good measure, and when he doesn’t move she flicks away the remains of his crushed skull and spine off of the weapon. With one more swing, she crushes Star Trail’s ribcage to paste before rushing over to Gem.
The changeling’s eyes are closed, and she isn’t breathing. Rather than risking transporting her in case she might still be alive, Anvil sprints out of the room where her personal Eleven is hiding behind the door.
“Call someone!” she orders.
“I did as soon as you went in-”
A bolt of lightning strikes the floor in front of him, transforming into Two who rushes past Anvil and straight to Gem. After a moment of examination, she lets out a sigh of relief.
“She’s in low-level hibernation,” she looks up at the towering minotaur, “Her lungs and windpipe are practically gone, so she couldn’t afford to have to breathe.”
“So what now?” asks Anvil. Her knowledge about treating changelings is limited to say the least. Pony libraries she’d visited were scarcely stocked on the subject.
“Don’t move her, and just wait,” says Two, glancing at the pulverized mess remaining of Star Trail, “I hate this so much...” she growls, “I know he’s not dead, that he’ll be back, but I don’t know how to prevent it. Why did Gem not call us for help?”
“Common isolation magic,” explains Anvil, who now Two notices is wearing nothing but a loincloth, steel greaves and gauntlets, “I felt it on the door when I came here for some exercise, it’s sort of a numb buzzing when you touch the entrance of a room under the spell. Royal Guards are using the castle grounds for their afternoon training.”
Two stands up, and starts pacing back and forth.
If I can’t win a fight, I need to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place… HOW? He can get anywhere and I don’t know anything to help prevent it. Think, Two, think!
Anvil walks over to the bits of Star Trail which aren’t a pile of goo, and pokes the flesh several times.
“Now this is familiar...” she stands up, and ask Two, “Hey, can you keep an eye on Gem?”
“Hmm?” Two’s ears twitch as Anvl’s question brings her out of the depths of her own thoughts, “Yes. As I said, she should stabilize in few minutes.”
“Good. I’ll report this to Celestia,” Anvil starts striding away, “I wish Bubbles was here. I could use someone with better nose.”
“Nose?” asks Two, but Anvil is already gone.
Furrowing her brows, she starts sniffing around, and ends by Star Trail’s corpse. Smells like death, nothing too unusual…
Wait, no… that’s not all…
The flesh is too dead, there is too little blood, it’s a smell of a massacre, but there’s also the faintest hint of previously necrotic tissue, like from the undead body, but also disinfectant and more… in fact, it smells like Seven’s laboratory back home. Anvil can’t have smelled that, so… she must have figured something out on her own. Maybe she encountered an undead like Star Trail before?
Okay, she needs to protect Gem and then get her to safety, and afterwards she needs to examine the castle a bit further.
***
One has jumped into the collapsing portal, and now immediately keels forward as her forelegs fail to hit any sort of ground. Her wings start buzzing to fight off the gust of wind sweeping her to the side and pelting her with snow. Glancing far, far down, she sees a white blanket of snow covering everything.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” she hears a scream following a loud poof behind her, and quickly turns around just in time to see the black and white blur of Contradiction flail her legs before dropping like a rock.
Snow or not, if the unicorn drops from this height, she’ll end up as goo. As One steadies herself against the wind, another poof and a blue flash nearby signal the appearance of someone small and quadrupedal - Bubbles, was it? With her size and weight, the following burst of air sends her dropping into the distance like a comet. Fully aware she will never reach her, One grits her teeth and keeps going for falling Contradiction.
The third poof, flash, and a loud scream reveal Astray flailing his arms and legs.
“I’M OKAY! GET HIM, GET HIM!” screams Connie, pointing at the satyr as One gets closer.
Immediately changing course, One snatches the satyr from the air, and floats down to safety. Looking at the snowdrifts below, she follows Contradiction’s drop which slows down on its own, making the unicorn land softly in the snow. As One carries Astray to Contradiction’s side, she says:
“I’m sorry for Bubbles, but with the wind up there, I couldn’t get both her and Astray.”
Connie rubs her chest as her black coat is rapidly turning white from the blizzard.
“S- She’ll b- be o- okay,” she mutters through chattering teeth, “W- We w- w- won’t if w- we s- s- stay h- here.”
To prove her right, snow explodes in the distance, and burst after burst, one jumping rusty demonette approaches.
“I LIKE THIS PLACE!” Bubbles yells with a grin after she rejoins the group and sinks up to her chest into the snow.
One looks around, unable to see much through the falling snow. From her limited knowledge of geography, snow like this can either mean deep south or north. She needs a vantage point to figure something out.
“Hey, can you last a bit longer?” she yells not to be drowned out by the howling snowstorm, “I’ll fly up and see if there’s shelter or something!”
The Silver Sun trio nod, and One takes to the air.
“W- We won’t l- last like t- this,” Connie frowns. Her horn lights up, and all the snow suddenly starts hitting a small dome surrounding her, Astray, and Bubbles. It doesn’t help against the cold, but the wind inside is a little tamer, and the snow is forming a physical dome around them with each passing second.
Astray is the only one wearing clothes, but in the frost here he might still be in worse shape than the ponies. A shirt, cloth pants, greaves, belt with a pistol and a sword, and chainmail gauntlets he managed to grab before rushing off to help defend princess Celestia aren’t even remotely enough protection.
Bubbles immediately starts kicking snow out of the dome, and when she clears out a circle with them inside, she pats Astray down to de-snowify him, and follows the same process with Connie. In the end, they huddle back to back inside the igloo which formed itself around Connie’s telekinetic barrier in the meantime. Coupled with the heat Connie and Astray can feel from the demonette, the situation is becoming almost bearable.
Up in the air, the situation isn’t much better, but One does catch a glimpse of something familiar - a purple shimmer in the distance. To make sure her hunch is correct, she turns around, and if her eyes aren’t playing tricks on her, the opposite side might indeed be a little darker.
So, what does she know?
The teleporter was a trap, obviously, or just unstable, and it seems to have kicked them somewhere between the Crystal Empire and the Everhoof range. Normally, that would mean she was safe and sound. Now, though, with three companions without proper gear, the situation could prove deadly. On the other hole, it’s still summer, so the blizzard won’t last long. With that in mind, she flies down, and after a short while finds a round sphere of snow which couldn’t be natural. After she clears the layer of snow, Connie sees her, and lets her inside.
“Comfy,” comments One.
“What did you find?” asks Connie in a no-nonsense tone.
“I couldn’t see much, but I think I spotted a shimmer in the distance which could be the Crystal Empire. You won’t get there in the storm, though. Not without proper clothes,” One shakes her head, “The good news is that at this time of year it won’t last long. As long as we kick a hole through the snow dome to get some air from time to time, you might be okay. You don’t know some sort of fire magic, do you?”
“I can’t use magic at all, only telekinesis,” replies Connie, “Birth defect.”
“Then we just have to cuddle!” Bubbles’ cheery voice is followed by shuffling in the pitch blackness, for everyone but One, and the demonette pulling them all into a hug.
All they need to do now is wait.
***
Two put her original plan on the back burner, at least for few minutes. Now, she’s in the infirmary wing, entering Bright Star’s room. The paladin is sitting by the window, watching the Royal Guards training on the castle grounds. As he hears the door open, he turns his head, and smiles.
“Hello, Two. What brings you here?”
“Star Trail just attacked Gem down in the castle dungeons, specifically the Royal Guard indoors training room.”
“Ah, damn it!” he stands up, and hisses as pain shoots through him, “How is she?”
“That Silver Sun minotaur mare, Anvil, made short process of him,” says Two, which makes Bright Star breathe out a relieved sigh, “Gem was extremely lucky Anvil was around, though. If she was alone, she would be dead. Even with Anvil stopping the worst from happening, she had to go into hibernation due to crushed throat and lungs.”
“By the sun...” Bright Star’s eyes go wide. He knows the regenerative properties of powerful changelings, but evoking the idea of such horrific wounds still makes him wince.
“Yeah yeah, she’ll be okay after a good night’s sleep, which is where you come in.”
“Do I?”
“I need someone who can do magic to keep an eye on her. Specifically someone who isn’t drowning in this whole paranoia about us. You know us better than any other pony, Bright Star. I need your help. Gem does, I mean, since she doesn’t know anything about magic. This attack only worked thanks to some stupid basic isolation spell, which was nonetheless nearly enough. If she knew enough to break the spell, she could have just called for help, and me and Cryo would have been there within seconds.”
“Of course I’ll help, Two. This much of a bed rest isn’t for me anyway. But how did Star Trail actually outfight miss Gem? I mean, a changeling of her caliber should be able to defend herself reasonably well, even if I consider her pacifist nature.”
“That stupid idea is gonna get her killed one day, and make dad really sad,” Two shakes her head, “Anyway, the problem here was that as an undead, Star Trail is immune to any mindfuckery we can do. On top of that… I saw part of his corpse, and he was big. Like, I mean, stronger, tougher, probably much faster too.”
“I see, a flesh-crafted revenant,” Bright Star scowls, “Then the lich is even more skilled than we thought. Negative energy spells aren’t so uncommon, but necromancy of this level is.”
“You know what pisses me off the most? It’s that he can strike anywhere. Both of them separately it seems.”
“Star Trail never needed the lich to use magic around the castle. Royal Guards can use most simpler spells here, but all of us paladins can completely alter our spellcasting to be usable inside the castle. Some of us with more talent at mobility spells, by which I don’t mean myself since my talent lies in protective magic, can use the castle’s framework of wards to teleport from normally unthinkable distances.”
“Wouldn’t really be a problem if he stayed dead at some point...” mutters Two.
“Now that is the lich’s work.”
“Gee, you think?” she lowers her head when she catches Bright Star’s surprised look at her irritated reply, “I’m sorry, I just feel like I can’t do anything. Can’t, I don’t know, Celestia remake the castle protections so that this doesn’t keep happening?”
Bright Star shakes his head.
“Two, the layers of spells have grown over centuries. In general, whenever there’s a real need for some addition like it was after queen Chrysalis’ invasion, the council of unicorns from the United Orders of Wizardry has to figure out how to weave in the new spell without ruining something or blowing themselves up. Rebuilding the network of wards would also disable any use of magic at all within the castle, which would turn off, let’s say, lamps, magical stoves and such. Paladins and Royal Guards would be completely screwed until they underwent a full retraining.”
“In short, too much work even when weighed against potential war of everyone against us changelings...” Two facehoofs.
“I know it sounds cold, but… yes,” Bright Star pats Two’s head, “But don’t worry, I’ll do all I can to help, at least for the duration of the summit, I swear.”
Two sighs.
“I wish it would be enough, but I doubt it. I need to think of something, anything. Boss has been gone for far too long, now One is gone, Gem nearly died,” she shakes her head, “At this rate, there will be no one to do diplomacy with. Gah! I hate being so useless again!”
“You aren’t useless, Two,” Bright Star pats her head again, “Just now, you’re making sure Gem isn’t in such a bad position again. That in itself might help. It won’t resolve the situation on its own, but it’s something.”
“Thanks for the sentiment, Bright Star,” she chuckles without any joy in it, “But I’m getting fed up with the growing list of things I can’t protect dad and others from.”
“Two, there will always be things that will take you by surprise, that you’re not ready for. What’s the most important is to keep a cool head, and try to do the best you can. As one smart pony once said - we can’t control our circumstances, we can only control how we react to them.”
“You’re literally saying this to a changeling whose only potential strength is controlling what happens, because she’s not exceptionally good at magic or fighting.”
Bright Star sighs.
“You know what I meant, Two.”
“Yeah yeah,” she taps into Gem who has just arrived in her room, and is now crawling into bed, “Gem is in her room with one Eleven standing guard. I’ve still got one lead I want to check out.”
“I’ll inform the staff where I’m going so that they don’t think a changeling stole me away or something,” Bright Star smirks.
“Thanks, I’ll tell Gem you’re coming,” Two gives him a quick smile, and rushes off.