The gathered Royal Guard gaped down at the body of the stallion lying broken before them. The towering structures of Manehattan stretched around them at all sides, reaching up like teeth to hold the corpse so carelessly tossed into this alley. Really, ‘corpse’ was the only label fitting with what was left of the young stallion scattered so carelessly on the cobbles, his corpse little more than the shell of a soul’s home.
“Oh gods,” whispered one of the guards. One of her senior offices cast her a look that read like an exclamation point to what a novice she was. “What a way to go!”
Another one of the gathered guards frowned at the newbie’s obviousness. Nopony should face such obvious vileness and not recognize the wrongness of this torture, but how did this one get through a military academy? Was she somehow conveniently sick every time it was brought up that the Royal Guard runs off honor, ability, justice, integrity, and intelligence — and that the sniveling sorts crying for empathy would find no place in the world as it was?
Bodies were studied in military academies, taken straight from Equestria’s sole prison, where those who were given a life sentence were stripped of burial rights-and-rites when that judge’s gavel came down and spelled out all that they earned. Their bodies were often used in a Royal Guard’s education and had been for centuries. The sight was as normal as the equine-shaped targets to provide realism on the ranges and instruct on a mortal body’s weakness. Did such a filly of a soldier cower before those too, as if they could hurt her?
The thoughts of that armored mare, so sharp and observant of her cowardly co-worker were cut short by one of her comrades in golden armor. He had lit his horn with careful light, letting a variety of crooked shadows dance around them. With the soft light to aid the lantern held by another pony in armor, the guards gathered could see the stallion’s corpse all the more clearly.
He was a unicorn, with a brown mane matted with his own blood. His eyes were too foggy to discern if their color in life had been blue, green, or something similar to both. Where his coat was unmarred, a cheery light peach stood out.
The fine white shirt the stallion had been wearing was torn, and his cutie mark of an equine leg in a cast was almost unrecognizable beyond that. Nearly cleaving the dead stallion in two were crystals, richer than any red any of the guards had seen before and still glistening. Unlike the workings of a geomancer, they weren’t growing from the ground; though this went unsaid, the peculiarity of it weighed upon everypony’s mind. The look of freshness that the crystals and blood had might just be a matter of magic, but it certainly was a sharp contrast to the corpse of the stallion, already rank in scent. Though, there was no analysis yet to tell why they appeared so.
From a shirt pocket spared of the slaughter, the unicorn guard stallion produced a folded faux-leather wallet. The jingle of bits sounded inside with his efforts to avoid stepping in stray intestines as he trotted closer to his squad.
He wordlessly passed the wallet to his second-in-command, as the stallion in charge of the patrol had left to ensure the ponies in charge of recovering the corpse would be able to work their way through the mess of streets that led to this off-street location. Pegasi were few and far between in Manehattan, and those that weren’t caught up in construction businesses were usually just weather ponies. None would be free when a storm was scheduled for the night, and there was only so much good a grounded pony could do to find their way quickly in the dense, concrete labyrinth of this part of the city.
Quick Spell, second-in-command and an unfortunate native of the urban space pulled out a few papers, unfolding a particularly thick piece of cardstock.
“Charley Horse,” he read off, enlarging his werelight to increase readability. “A physician's apprentice. He lived in a good part of town.”
A parcel, tattered and torn spilled out from saddlebags discarded nearby. The brown paper wrapping went dutifully untouched by the guard, but all could see that it had been stomped upon in a careless, savage attempt to get open in a hurry — something characteristic only of earth ponies. Yet, the presence of such advanced magic was a clear sign that suggested no earth pony under Celestia’s sun could do such a thing.
Brown sugar spilled out from its once neat packaging. One of the guard mares peered down at the label stamped there. “Jolly Holly’s? Why her store is only a quick trot away. My grandmother buys their sugar all the time!”
“Then it appears Mister Horse might have been doing some shopping before he was attacked,” piped up one of the younger stallions, Swift Blade. “Who would want to attack him over a grocer’s parcel?”
“I believe,” interjected the particularly astute Stoic Resolve, who spotted the cowardice of their greenhorn mare, “that whoever attacked Mister Horse might have believed he was in possession of something else.”
“Resolve does appear to speak the truth,” Quick Spell said hesitantly, turning the cardstock over to the rest of his patrol. A portrait of the apprentice as he had once appeared in life was clear on the identification sheet. “This stallion had proper clothes for his work, and we find him torn in such a ghastly fashion and left in scraps!”
Scraps indeed. The portrait of Charley had round, gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his muzzle along with evidence that he usually wore a silk top hat. A vest bearing golden buttons was visible under the long coat in the portrait. The stallion was an entirely respectable type as far as they could tell, and his name with any connection to Manehattan crimes had never reached their ears. There was no doubt he had come from his workplace and should have been clad in the full array of clothes pictured on his identification slip. Why else would he have it on his pony?
It was such a simple thing to find on a pony of the good standing Charley Horse was in. A slip of neat, elegant hornwriting listing off his mark, name, address, magic color, and other unchanging features. Multiple seals of legitimacy were stamped upon the cream-colored surface. Nothing would usually lend any special quality to a mere aspect of the protocol, and yet the entire patrol huddled in that cramped little side street felt the significance of the identification looming over them more than the wind carrying the weight of the coming rain of the emergency bells and sirens now blaring throughout the city.
Of the six previous ponies murdered in an equally similar fashion, crimson crystals and all, Charley Horse was the only one that could be identified: thus providing the true start to investigating the serial murders weighing upon Manehattan.