The battle was not going well for the ponies of Canterlot.
The retreating ponies were pushed back so far that they were soon spread thin by simple city geometry and design, forced to cover multiple streets in order to keep themselves from being surrounded, which meant that their line was only a pony deep and only barely managed to stretch across all avenues of potential attack. That line was unable to truly entrench itself, and as such, was constantly pushed even further as a result.
Celestia bored the brunt of the assault, teleporting rapidly across the battlefield to bolster her troops when they faltered. Her flaming sword cleaved lines through oncoming hoards and bought her guards precious time to fortify positions or simply retreat to a new one. Static did as much as she could to assist, but being unable to teleport or fly as fast as Rainbow Dash was, she was limited in her effectiveness, adding her strength to only a few streets while Celestia covered the rest.
Her sword had long since become slick with blood, the pegasus having conceded that simply knocking the invaders out was only doing them a favour, even if they would only wake up either when she let them, or when she was knocked unconscious and was unable to control her magic. Her armour was dented, and her helmet had lost one of it’s horns to a heavy blow from a pike.
There were popping and cracking sounds that were not coming from Unicorn horns or alchemical explosives, but rather from something Static had dreaded seeing in Equestria since her arrival three years prior.
Guns. They were crude, little more than prototype matchlock rifles that had terrible aim and took a long time to reload, but they were still a threat to the unwary, since the ammunition they fired seemed to be made of the same material the Jotuns magic resistant armour was.
The royal guard armour was enough to protect them from these firearms in a simple one on one fashion, but when stragglers were caught by a hail of bullets, there was little even the unicorns could do to protect them.
Static dove over the heads of her current guard force, and charged at a group of reloading rifle-wielders, ripping off her horned helmet and using the metal as a bludgeon, since it was now so dented and broken that it barely sufficed as protection, having already taken several shots from the matchlocks. Static was too tired to fix her armour anymore.
With helmet in one hoof and sword in the other, Static smashed one rifle downward with her helmet, before slicing through its owners neck and plunging the blade into another Jotun’s gut in the same motion. Ripping it back out, she dropped, avoiding several hastily drawn daggers and cutting through ankle tendons as she rolled under the Jotuns. The ones who’s ankles had been slashed dropped immediately, howling in pain and clutching their wounds.
With them out of the fight, Static leaped into action against the remaining four in the group, spinning in a deadly dance that lodged her sword in one Jotun’s heart, and put her in the middle of the others. She lashed out with her dream magic again, hellish dark tentacles erupting from thin air behind her to spear through the other Jotuns.
With that group crossed off her list of worries, Static turned tail and galloped, not particularly wanting to get caught by another volley of bullets like last time. The other groups of Jotuns were preparing to fire their next volley when a blast of sunfire scorched them to ash, leaving this street clear.
Watching as Celestia rained fire on her enemies, Static took wing and came down into a gallop behind the Jotuns pursuing this streets defenders. She leaped onto the rearmost Jotuns back and plunged her sword between his helmet and his thick bevor, slipping the blade between the protective metal plate and his helmet, dropping him to the ground as she used his tumble to launch herself onto the next one, who felt her land and went to grab her. Static sliced his hand open and used his arm as a catapult to fling her body around his, so that she landed with her hooves caving in his breastplate.
She wasn’t able to reach the forward Jotun, one of the small ones they had seen disembarking the ships, before it reached the slowest pony guard. It was on him in seconds, leaping onto his hindquarters and slashing deep into his back severing his spine. The guard was dead in seconds, but the Jotun didn’t seem to care, laughing wildly and slashing madly, using it’s awful clawed gauntlets to tear the body into bloody shreds.
Static made sure it didn’t get the chance to kill another, hurling her sword at the vicious beast and impaling it through the back. This unfortunately left her weaponless against nearly fifteen eleven to twelve foot tall monsters who saw her as little more than a new toy to break.
A crashing sound emerged from a nearby alley on her left, and a Jotun came flying out, before a familiar figure came barreling into it, a long, staff like weapon with an pointed tipped, axe like head on the end ramming into the creature and nearly splitting it in half. He was spouting curses and was in desperate need of a shower, due to how much blood covered his purple armour. Behind him lay a pile of Jotun corpses, all in states of dismemberment.
“Crimson!” Static called to the Architect, drawing his attention, and revealing him to the Jotuns. “Could you lend a hand?”
“Have you seen Twilight?!” Crimson snarled, ripping his huge bardiche free of the wall it had been embedded in.
“Not since Celestia told her and Luna to evacuate!” Static called, diving between the Jotuns in their distracted state and grabbing her sword. Her headache was getting worse.
“I don’t think anyone made it out yet! The Jotuns got to the gates first!” Crimson met the first Jotun with a headbutt, denting his helmet but knocking the Jotun to the floor in a daze, before a quick slash of his weapon slit its throat. He knocked another Jotun’s weapon to the side, taking a nasty blow from an axe to his shin in the process. His armour held, and he brought his bardiche around to decapitate the Jotun in front of him before kicking the axe wielder in the groin and spinning the blunt end of his pole-arm to smash in the axe wielder’s face.
Static did what she did best, dodging around the big, lumbering swings of her opponents before springing off of any available surface to cut through vulnerable flesh and sever armour straps for an easier time. There went a Jotun’s shin guard, and then quickly after, his lower leg, cut off just below the knee before her sword parted his head from his shoulders. Then she vaulted over a clumsy sword thrust and ran up the bearers arm before pulling on his helmet and leaping away, using her weight to unbalance him, giving Crimson an opening to slam his bardiche into the Jotun’s chest with a massive crunch. Her armoured wings flared, the radial bone of her left, similar in function to a human arm’s elbow, clothes-lining a Jotun as she flew past, sending her into a spin. She recovered in a quick tumble, before sending her hind legs into an attacker’s knees and bending them completely backwards. A quick jab with her sword ended his cries of pain.
Her mind was going numb from it all. She had killed before, and gotten over it, justified it. But this was…..too much. Too much blood. Too much death for her mind to process. So it didn’t. She felt oddly emotionless, empty of anything except rage, panic and desperation, and a burning will to survive.
The Jotuns in that street had run out of bodies to send at them now, so the two friends turned to gallop and sprint off in search of other ponies, heading towards the city gates.
They met little resistance they couldn’t deal with alone, and the few fights they couldn’t finish without help were fought beside guards they had come across along the way. Several were the last of their companies, or had been separated from theirs, so they joined Static and Crimson’s growing band of resistance as they approached the city wall.
They arrived to carnage in a ring around a cordoned off section of untouched city, bodies mounted in the streets, several of them the defenders, but most of them the attackers, something that pleased Static’s hyper alert amygdala as it was a seemingly safe place to be.
A crowd of ponies stood behind the guards, including some familiar faces that Static was overjoyed to see alive, but concerned that they were still in the city.
“Twilight! Girls!” Static called, rushing over once they had been admitted past the line of guard ponies.
“Static! Crimson!!” Twilight rushed her personal bodyguard and launched herself into a full wing hug, before giving Static a similar, if much shorter version. “I’m so glad you’re alright!”
“Why haven’t you left yet?” Static cut through the celebration of survival. Now wasn’t the time for that.
“These civilian ponies.” Rainbow panted, covered in sweat and her wing blades coated in gore. “They’re still trapped inside! We couldn’t just leave them!”
“Trapped inside? How? Why can’t you open the gates?” Crimson asked.
“The mechanism is jammed or broken somehow.” Applejack wiped her brow to clear her hair out of her eyes. Her braids were loose and her stetson looked half crushed and half torn. “We think it was sabotaged early on in the fighting, but it’s taking too long to fix it!”
“Then just bust it down!” Static thundered. “We don’t have time to waste on getting it open and getting them out of here!”
“We can’t! The city wards will defend it if we don’t open it properly! We’d lose dozens of ponies just trying!” Twilight explained, as quickly as she could.
“Then…..then what can we do?”
“You can surrender to me.”
The ponies all went dead silent. As one, they turned to the insidious voice of the Storm King, standing alone at the entrance of the main thoroughfare of Canterlot. His staff was crackling, and he was grinning. “Well? Are you all as stubborn as your Princess? Or just too scared to speak up?”
Applejack went to speak, likely intending to voice a snarky comeback, but Static grabbed her by the shoulder shook her head, motioning to the gatehouse on the wall. The Earth Pony took a few moments to look between the gatehouse and the King, before nodding and slinking away through the crowd.
A few seconds after the King spoke, Static emerged from the crowd, standing tall, with her mane and tail blowing in the hot wind created by the fires that had started to belch smoke up into the sky. She realized that Crimson was standing beside her, and, curiously, that the King didn’t seem too bothered with his appearance.
“Ah, so you know about the Architects as well then.” The King drawled, pointing his staff at Crimson. “Are you sure you want your pet to see this?”
Crimson growled, and Static felt bile rising in her throat at the insinuation. “Crimson isn’t my pet, you fucking piece of shit! He’s my friend!”
“And do you make all your little pets play dress up?”
Static bit back her next retort instead choosing to hurl a rock his way by kicking it into the air with her hind leg, then catching it in her wing and slinging it in his direction.
The King just leaned to the left and watched it sail on by, before going back to his original position with a smirk.
“Storm King!” Static winced at the sound of Twilight’s nervous voice as the Alicorn approached. She passed between Static and Crimson, coming to a stop a few paces ahead of them. “Please! Enough of this violence! Haven’t you spilled enough blood already? Much of it is your own soldiers!”
The king brushed her concerned plea aside with a laugh. “If they died, then they were weak. And the weak deserve to die, or be put in their place by the strong.”
Twilight flinched, ears splaying back in sadness. And anger.
“How could you be so cruel! We’ve never done anything to you!”
The King stopped laughing, his vaguely amused smile slipping silently from his ape-like face. “Never?” He asked. “You claim your kind has never done harm to mine?” He started to laugh again, an awful,soulless, mocking sound. “Then explain why we have been living off scraps when your people have lived like kings and queens for centuries! Explain how an empire that once claimed everything south of here as it’s own fell so far! Explain that to me, Princess, and I will concede that your kind has never done us harm!”
“We didn’t even know you existed until you attacked us, you jerk!” Rainbow yelled.
“Then your predecessors were fools too, for not telling you the truth.” The King sighed, before reaching into his armour, like he did in the courtyard. The throw came quickly, this time too quickly and far too close to Twilight for Static or even Rainbow to react.
But Crimson was closer than either of them. And he had seen the attack and started to move before the orb even left the Kings clawed hand.
It sailed through the air, headed directly for the Princess, who’s eyes widened in shock.
And then it hit Crimson instead, bursting open as he jumped in the way and dousing him in a noxious green gas, that almost instantly engulfed him in shiny, dark stone.
Twilight’s already widened eyes shrank to pinpricks. “CRIMSON!!!”
At that moment, the drawbridge fell open, with Applejack already yelling for ponies to start moving. The crowd turned and galloped, the thunder of hooves down the road that lead to freedom and safety drowning out the despairing wails of a Princess as she was hauled away by four of her best friends, watching the darkened form of another friend shrink in her sight, and the smaller form of a second friend desperately holding back a towering, storm wielding titan with nothing but a sword.
The drawbridge was closed moments after, leaving Static cut off from her friends as she tried to keep the King from chasing after them. He wasn’t holding back this time, his swords moving so fast she barely even saw them, dodging this time purely on instinct, and often failing. Cuts opened on her flanks, and her armour was systematically whittled away by a far superior blades-man than herself. She lost a length of her mane in place of her head thanks to a well timed duck, but was met with a clawed foot to the chest that sent her careening into a wall. Bricks cracked as she slammed into the thick stone, and something gave way in her ribcage, tearing a ragged, garbled shriek from her lips as she fell heavily onto the flagstones below.
She raised her sword to block the incoming blow only through sheer effort of will alone, her foreleg shaking so much from the pain that the blade wobbled in place, before the King’s own twin swords came smashing down on it.
And in that moment, something in her mind snapped. Not her psyche, or her sanity. Her Nightmare. The magical, sentient beast that had been molded by an agreement struck between pony and monster, into a sword and armour to protect her, and defend her.
It shattered like glass after all the strain it had suffered through that day.
Her armour vanished, and her sword lost its magic, lost its power, becoming nothing more than a lifeless heap of metal shards that landed, piled in front of her. She reached to trail a bloodied hoof through her shattered blade, the remains of a companion she had carried with her for over two years. Gone.
She heard a vengeful scream, and through her blurring, darkening vision, saw a burning, white light slam into the King, before his staff connected with her chest, and Celestia was sent hurtling away, crackling with electricity.
Static groaned, and slipped into the sweet embrace of darkness.
Celestia didn’t have that luxury, instead having to feel several thousand volts of lightning course through her body and send every nerve dancing in excruciating pain. Her muscles twitched involuntarily as she struggled for control, managing to get her legs under her and keeping them from buckling. She brought her flaming sword up, the magic intercepting the next attack that swept over her and crackled against the flagstones and burned all the nearby grass blades that poked up between the stones, or grew in the planters or designated green areas that Celestia had forced the nobles to accept nearly seventy years previously.
Snarling at seeing some of her work undone, Celestia galloped forward to meet the king, knocking aside his staff and slashing with a practiced grace and proficiency that had been learned across centuries. The only thing that saved the king from her blade was his own skill. Gaul broke off his spellcasting to spin his staff up, meeting her magic blade with the haft of the staff, the two weapons meeting with a shower of sparks- both made of fire and electricity.
The king shoved back against her and finding her like a mighty mountain range, completely immovable. She took his shove by bracing her muscles and locking her legs, magic holding her blade firm, before countering his shove with one of her own. She forced him backwards with all the effort it would take to knock over a barstool, her sword, eyes and mane spitting more sparks.
All around, the last of her loyal guards were valiantly battling against the King’s forces, a pair even trying to carry Static Thunder away while others protected them. Flames and smoke where consuming the city, whole blocks at a time, with smoke choking the sky in thick grey, almost black, sheets.
Celestia felt anger, pure, unadulterated rage, surging through her body and out of her horn in a torrent of flames, that met a poorly made shield and flowed over and around it, dripping to the floor and splattering the courtyard with gobbets of liquid fire. Her armour had long since melted off of her body and become a living suit of flames, turning her into a living embodiment of her blazing sun. She glowed brighter than anything in the city, or even on the planets surface, the heat starting to sear and burn everything around her in an expanding circle.
She breathed out jets of super heated air, her hoofsteps melting into the stone underneath them and carrying her closer to the King.
So close that her Alicorn vision was able to pierce through the flames and the shield, and see the King in his desperate attempt to hold her back.
And Static Thunder clasped in his grip, awake and with her teeth gritted, still trying to escape. Two royal guards lay dead behind him, with more being killed by the Jotuns even further back.
“Surrender, and they live.” The King gasped through the effort he was expending to protect himself, and by extension, Static. “Refuse and they die.”
Celestia’s eyes went wide, and she stepped back.
“NO!!!!! KILL THIS BASTARD!! DON’T RISK EQUESTRIA FOR ME!!” Static screamed her throat roar to be heard over the flames. But it didn’t matter.
The Princess had already made her choice. Her head drooped, her flames went out in an instant, and she spoke in a hushed, barely heard whisper.
“Let them go.”
The King stood, panting, before flinging Static to one side, where she was caught by more of his guards, who immediately put blades to her throat.
“No. I don’t think I will.” Celestia’s eyes turned hard again, only for a quick movement of a blade towards Static’s throat to stop her. “Try to resist, and what little is left of your precious guards, and anyone who was left behind, dies. Slowly, and painfully.”
“NO!!!! DON’T LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THI-GAHH!!” Static started trying to convince Celestia to keep fighting, but the Jotun holding her by the mane yanked back on it, hard.
Celestia bowed her head, and her blade and armour fizzled out of existence, her mane returning to it’s normal, multi-coloured hues. “I surrender. Just don’t hurt them.”
The King leveled his staff at the Princess, grinning broadly. “Oh don’t worry. I will.”
The Princess’s eyes went wide again, only for her body to suddenly betray her, an awfully familiar sensation tearing through her body. Magic streamed from her every pore, ripped from her in a stream that drained into the staff, the fires of the sun mingling with the might of the storms within, turning the staff’s crystal from blue to a deep, blazing orange that made everything around it look like it was being bathed in red. Even the King’s eyes twisted to match that vile colour, the orange light shining in their depths. With a gasp that emptied her lungs, Celestia felt that spark of immortality that had kept her alive for centuries, suddenly flicker out.
The Princess collapsed over, her wings crumbling to ash as she grew smaller, her mane going limp and lifeless. She was just a Unicorn, with pink mane and tail and pale white fur that was streaked with blood and ash. She was barely breathing.
“NO!!! CELESTIA! NO!!” Static thrashed in her captors grip, managing to wriggle free at last and snatch the Jotun’s overly large dagger from his belt and sliced across his neck before her could blink. She landed on her hooves and charged at the King, but barely made it a few steps before deep orange lightning slammed into her chest, and sent her toppling to the floor with convulsions that set her fur and feathers to smoldering.
The King made his way over to her, slowly, and casually. He stood over the Pegasus with a little smile, before he raised his foot up over her head, then brought it down in a sudden blow that sent Static spinning into unconsciousness.
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Static woke up to the taste of copper in her mouth and a nasty feeling of deja vu, like she had woken up in captivity before. Which she actually had, come to think of it, in Vancouver, when she had tried to help her family and the small group of resistance fighters in their struggle against Queen Chrysalis. They’d put her and the girls into a small room and made them wait. She’d slept through most of it.
This wasn’t like that though. This was true imprisonment. She was in a cell because her enemies had put her there. This wasn’t a misunderstanding. This wasn’t an accident.
This was real.
Canterlot had fallen.
Static sat up, looking around the vaguely familiar dungeon of Canterlot for anything that she might use.
Of course, it being a dungeon, it was designed to be as difficult as possible to escape from. Even for someone privy to it’s design and potential secrets.
Which Static wasn’t. She was trapped in a place designed to hold people like her. And she wasn’t alone. The other cells were full of ponies, many crammed into spaces that weren’t meant to house more than three or four ponies, and always exceeding that capacity- except for two. Her cell, and the cell of a pony who lay limply on her cot, her breathing slow and light, barely even noticeable.
Celestia.
She looked awful, her mane cut short like many of the ponies, and with a collar put around her neck. Her wings were gone, and her horn was far shorter than it used to be.
A quick feel with her hoof informed Static that there was no collar around her neck, strangely enough. Everypony else had one.
Sitting in that cell, Static knew that they considered her to be little more than a nuisance. That she was next to harmless, and that trying anything would be stupid and would probably get her killed. And they were almost definitely right about that.
But then again......
Static had never claimed to be a genius.
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