Gold Shield was named for the badge her family wanted her to have tucked in her armor and over her heart. ‘Gold Shield’ was merely the translation of her name from her native Trotsian tongue to Equestrian. Her badge, while still gold, was not the kind to be tucked into the breast pocket of the same uniformed officers who patrolled her mountainous home nation. The small one pressed between many other nations to the south, chiefly Prance and Germaneigh. There, cobbled streets were clean, and the backdrop for the glorious Winter Dancing School in the capital city. Her white coat was traditional for many dancers and natives to her homeland.
Here in Equestria, the spells on her armor washed her coat white anyway. Her mane was left in a standard blue variant, not unlike the one that could be found on Equestria’s flag. Gold was told many things about Equestria during her young life. That they loved and cared for immigrants was what lured her to its borders in the first place. Though she had not realized that the royal guard of Equestria was an armored legion of ponies-only, though the latter was an unspoken rule, as was the rest of the unconscious bias of the nation.
That bias was not something she had expected to see in a nation so large, but it was not inherently malicious. Not in many of the places Gold had seen, and she was a simple mare from a much smaller city surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Other than the occasional goat or cow, Trotsia had no non-pony citizens. Bias was an understatement in Trotsia, Gold had always been aware she lived in what bordered on an unintended ethnostate. She moved away because she could not bear the sameness of it all, and knowing that those who wished to intentionally make it such a state. It was lamented by the king that had been wrongly dethroned in the last war; he wrote and spoke out against it as much as he was allowed. Gold’s family had not been the only one she had known who spoke in hushed whispers, urging her to get away, nor was she the only one in her community to leave. She was just the only one who traded one ailing nation, a republic groaning under the weight of prejudice, for another with the same ailments.
Sometimes, she found herself awake at night and tracing the pattern on her ceiling using only her tired eyes. Then, she would wonder if she should have skipped out on Equestria and stayed surrounded by everypony she knew in Trotsia. Gold would have never come if she had known that the equality of Equestria was but a more quietly humiliating and thicker slice of the sameness that she had endured back home. There was no casualness to it in Equestria. At least, none that she could feel. It all felt as mandatory as rainbows, blinding sunshine, and false smiles.
Mortal-led nations like Trotsia kept their armies in an age of bright button-up coats and bayonets for the most part. There were a few exceptions: exotic Saddle Arabia with its scimitar-wielding horse warriors and Mustainia’s multi-species siege camps. She had heard Prance and Germaneigh all had their own knightly troops on par with the solar goddess-princess and her armored legions. But did they feel the same erasure that came from being just another soldier instead of somepony’s comrade and sibling-in-arms, an esteemed officer of the law?
Gold Shield honed her flare spells to perfection in the only magic academy Trotsia had. It was there that she heard ‘Goldener Schild’ said to her for the last time. She longed for it as much as she wished to see the vast landscapes of Equestria unfolding beneath an airship again. That was how she came to this country, and she did not expect to be in a city where there were no airships or even any real green spaces for her to treasure. Even the grass in the one great park in this city had never tasted fresh.
She thought back to the academy again, and how they had tried to spur her into a future in a nation that wasn’t crippled.
Go to Equestria, they had urged her upon graduation. They have magic like there is air.
Gold Shield did not have the heart to write home and tell her family that she didn’t mind hearing her name in her new country’s tongue. It was the least of her ills. She also did not have the heart to tell them that just because magic was prevalent here did not mean it was applied well. They were unicorns like her living in the mountains generations of Schilds had called home, yet were ruled and outvoted by pegasus ponies in the lowlands that did not care for them. Yes, Gold Shield was a soldier under the command of divinity, but she could not bear writing that the work she did was peacetime police work. That was such a small thing and her parents expected her to be the golden foal, or else they would not have named her so.
There was no disgrace in that; all nations required there to be numerous armed forces within one’s borders. What Gold Shield knew there was a disgrace in was that unicorn soldiers were treated like defective earth ponies, save for the higher unicorn officers. She was not permitted to utilize her special talents and she was outfitted identically to an earth pony’s measurements and expected to fight, act, and work in the exact same way as those who were inherently different in their capability from her. All the advanced techniques she had learned were water down the drain in this land.
The only disgrace lay in those that Gold Shield had to be exposed to. Equestria was a generally progressive, diplomatic nation, especially in the southern continent where old military attitudes flourished like butterflies in spring gardens. They welcomed newcomers like Gold Shield, and major cities had diverse neighborhoods. She had expected to end up in a small town like Cape Clydesdale or a southern frontier outpost like Ponyville. Instead, Gold Shield was stationed in the Big Apple and made to clean up the degenerates that brought so much rottenness.
The city had been good, or so Gold was told. Once, long ago, before all the whores came. They are the bait for far more rotten things.
And it was those whores and perverts that Gold Shield had to clean up. Somepony had to, as the United Council of Civilized Kingdoms was clear in its treaty, and Equestria had made the heinous act of self-exploitation illegal long before any other known nation. There would be no monsters walking the streets, whether they were that common sort or they clung to the gilded lie of ‘courtesan’ and ‘call-pony’ in an attempt to hide their vileness. The degenerates who bought such evil were hunted down in slightly different ways. In the end, all who violated principles of dignity and Harmony found themselves under the golden horseshoes of Equestria’s EUP, which Gold now counted herself among.
(Or, at least most of them did.)
That was why it was so surprising that one day, Gold Shield’s superior officer summoned her to see the leader of all Manehattan’s guards. He was an earth pony; of course the vast majority were all earth ponies, especially the superior officers. Gold Shield remembered reading that less than half a dozen cities in Equestria big enough to have superior officers stationed there had any that weren’t earth ponies — and that was counting Cloudsdale, which had to have a non-earth pony anyway.
What was more of a surprise was that when she arrived at the spacious meeting room, the vast majority of ponies gathered around the commander were unicorns. She had always known that some of her coworkers were unicorns, but certainly not this many. As quickly as she could, Gold Shield slipped into the crowd and tried to blend in. There might be trouble at hoof. On went her helmet, and her mane of delicate pale gold with shining streaks disappeared.
…
City Commander Valiant Heart breathed a sigh of relief as Gold Shield was ushered inside and found her place in the crowd. Once she had stepped into the room, her magic shut the door behind her. He took notice of her blinking and watched as the private slipped her helmet on, quickly blending in with the rest of the camouflaged unicorn guards.
Valiant stood up a little straighter, his armor still cold against his coat. Comrade or not, he always felt that unicorns were best kept at a distance. Most of the time that was easy; they rarely filled the higher ranks of the guard that he spent the majority of his time among when he was on duty. Occasionally, one would find that the latest Captain of all guards was a unicorn, but that was a rarity. One couldn’t help but feel uneasy around them, knowing that with just a few simple flashes of light, your day could be ruined and the unnatural could be made into the norm. Who could be blamed for feeling wary of unicorns, knowing how tricky their magic hoodoo was?
He cleared his throat deeply, letting his thoughts stray to the goddess of Canterlot. Princess Celestia was capable of summoning a booming Royal Canterlot Voice that enthralled all her subjects. If he could open with even half the power of his princess, this would all go smoothly.
“I know that every one of you can see what’s going on in this room. This is not a normal meeting and you all are not normal ponies. All your winged comrades are gone, and your regular ones are too. You have only me, and I expect nothing but the highest respect from all of you during this meeting. Our goddess herself is greatly distraught at the tragic violence that has broken out in our city. Any mere mortal would be at the point of tears, but in her perfection, she presses on. All of you who went to school here had classes in Equestrian morality. I know every single one of you remembers the Celestian Principles of Obedience, Kindness, Generosity, Optimism, Humility, Destiny, and Submission. I expect every one of you to exemplify them not just in how you treat me, or how you keep our goddess in mind, but in how you will conduct yourself as royal guards.”
“SIR! YES, SIR!” a room full of unicorns chanted back to him,
Valiant Heart nodded in approval, then sat himself at the desk waiting for him. He slipped his hooves out of the special armor of City Commanders and brought one forehoof to the other, cracking them. “Now, this is what I’m here to start with.”
There were multiple thick file folders on the desk. He scooped up one of them and flipped it open, grabbed a few papers, then stood up. The blackboard behind him was pristinely cleaned by the staff who kept every room of Fort Barnacle in top shape. It was wide and curved like the bottom of a horseshoe so that all who stood in the room could glimpse it. Valiant reached into a bin stuck to the blackboard where horseshoe magnets were waiting. With his mouth, he carefully affixed the papers to the board, then reached into another bin for a piece of red chalk. Every single guard immediately knew that it was time for connections to be made and watched as he drew circles around some papers and lines between the others before returning it.
“What we have here is a case like no other. In our age of modern marvels, every single one of you unicorns can no longer use your magic to escape identification. No longer are those without magic oppressed and able to only guess if a unicorn is behind the crime. No longer is our citizenry able to be victimized with only dependence on powerful unicorns’ limited insight into reading a crime scene to know if anything was done by magic. Generations of work have made us systems that can read into your kind more than hoofprints and teeth can be read. We have heaps of magical evidence from the scenes of these crimes. A unicorn lady by the name of Ebony Henbane is the Head Coroner at this establishment and she is baffled. Why is that?”
Every single unicorn in the room was silent. A few exchanged helpless looks with each other. More than a few were confused and pawing at the ground. Gold Shield had scrunched up her muzzle.
“Sir, permission to speak?” Gold Shield asked.
Valiant Heart looked at her with vague disdain and ran a hoof over his buzzcut. “Permission granted.”
“Have we got any witness sightings yet?”
“No, ma’am. That we do not have. The closest we have to a sighting is this.” He tapped one of the papers with a forehoof. “Notes from Ebony Henbane about the scene of the sole stallion victim showed disturbed blood. Our killer was lying in it.”
“On their back or on their stomach?” somepony asked.
Valiant glared at the crowd. “On their back,” he clarified. “That was when they were getting the bits under the bed, we think.
Gold Shield stared thoughtfully at the floor. “Permission to speak again, sir?”
“Granted,” grumbled Valiant, standing a little straighter. He rolled his withers and his armor rolled with him, catching the light.
“Lying on the back would make it very difficult to get the bits, especially if there were saddlebags to levitate them into. The bits were likely grabbed at some other point. Lying on the stomach would possibly allow us to get an impression of a limb or something that might possibly hint at the physiology of our killer. The back conceals this. We might have a sign of ritualistic behavior here.”
“You are leaping to many conclusions there, Corporal.” Impatience that was hardly ever given to earth ponies and pegasi had crept into his tone.
“Commander,” Gold Shield said quickly, squeezing into the front of the line, “I do not think our killer would have physically been able to cram bits into upside-down saddlebags. They must have gathered the bit some other way. If there was time to lie down, the killer maybe wasn’t in a hurry to leave, sir. Doesn’t anypony else agree?”
There were hesitant nods and murmurs from the other unicorns.
“Corporal, this isn’t the most important detail in the whole damn—”
“Permission to speak again, sir?” Gold Shield replied, her gaze nervously flicking from the commander to the blackboard, then to her comrades.
“This is the last time I’m letting you derail things,” Valiant said, giving a heavy sigh and tapping his hoof impatiently. He wasn’t even looking at Gold Shield. Instead, his hard gaze was trained and squinting at the files on the board.
“The file with the diagram of the approximate position of the killer lying down shows a way that would have been impossible for an adult unicorn. Just look at—”
“Hay biscuits and homefries! Sweet Celestia, what do you mean? The killer is a unicorn. That is unicorn-level complexities in magic. Ain’t no damn way a unicorn isn’t galloping about, creating all these crystals, and killing all these ponies.”
“—the way that the head is positioned,” Gold Shield finished meekly, dropping her gaze to the floor. Two unicorns on her left took steps away from the shorter mare as if they sensed the shame rolling off her.
The commander’s gaze was shaper than a knife and as trained on Gold Shield as the scope of a griffin’s hunting gun. “What about it?” His voice was low and angry. “I’m here to let you lot know you ought to be better at finding clues in these damn murders. We have a record number of unicorns here in this department compared to previous years. And yet, none of you can solve anything? It’s like I ought to pour the details down all your throats, and yet y’all’re supposed to know magic! Tell me, Gold, what’s so special about the head arrangement? How does that matter more than any of the important details that I have yet to get to due to your insubordination?”
Gold Shield’s expression was a mask of false calm as she stared quietly at the floor.
“Go on,” came the bitter mocking tone of Valiant Heart. “Speak, girl.”
“Sir…” Gold Shield began weakly, “the killer’s head is far too close to the bed. A full-grown unicorn would get stuck. D-Developmental surveys show that unicorns have specially evolved to find comfort in an array of unusual sitting positions as well as almost being universally prone to stillness in sleep. Even unicorns with ADHD are shown to have remarkably low rates of hyperactivity. We are inclined to any movement that would not hurt our horns. To lie on one’s back and use that position to look under the bed — or to tilt back the head at all — would have gotten her horn stuck. The way the illustration is suggesting that the head was held — sort of pushed back against the ground and upside down — would have gotten the horn stuck in the bed or the ground. How is this unicorn behavior?”
“How does that overrule any of the magic?” snapped Valiant Heart. “You can’t blame any other race for things like this.”
“What do we know about the magical signature?” piped somepony else.
“The spell-makeups are completely unlike anything from any creature the analysts have seen, but the signature is a pony and not qilin or any other damn creature,” came the almost rehearsed sound of Valiant Heart’s gruff voice.
“That doesn’t really sound like a pony…” somepony muttered, “...our spell-makeups are essential to identifying magical illnesses, disabilities, and tying in species identification.”
The voice had been decidedly foreign enough that Valiant Heart snapped his attention to the disguised unicorn guards. “Which one of you said that?”
“It was I,” said a voice. “Staff Sergent Ziel Erfasst, sir. Germaneigh was not long to make something like your Equestrian Arcane Registry Base when your country traded with my homeland the workings of such complex systems. We found many secrets to reading spell-structures and what they can tell us about the magical arts.”
“I’m sure that many ponies would simply applaud that as a power of Germane engineering,” Commander Valiant Heart said tiredly, with an irritable hint to his tone. “But I’m not one to dish out praises so easily. When Equestria discovers those things, that’s when they’ll be damn relevant. Germaneigh and their tentative new ideas are wonderful, probably — but they have nothing to do with the crimes that I’ve been assigned. Now, if anypony will let me speak, I’ll get to the important details Princess Celestia herself wanted me to give to you lot of unicorns about solving this crime better—”
“Sir! Sir!” chirped one unicorn mare, who jumped up and down from her place in the back rows. “If the killer is a unicorn skilled in some genuinely prodigious magics, why does their tool-work and other basic acts come across so sloppy?”
Valiant Heart’s face was close to purple with his newfound anger.
“Magical disability?” somepony suggested.
Another unicorn chimed in: “This would be a severe one, and somehow it’s not documented—”
“And disabilities in magic are registered with the ARB and other services,” replied another unicorn guard, nodding sagely.
“ENOUGH FROM ALL OF YOU! EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU NEEDS TO SHUT UP AND SHOW SOME OF THE PRINCIPLES HERE! OBEDIENCE, WHICH YOU ALL ARE SHIRKING! SUBMISSION, WHICH I DO NOT SEE HAPPENING! HUMILITY, WHICH NONE OF YOUR KIND KNOW HOW TO SHOW!” The nostrils of Valiant Sky were flared, and his booming voice sent every unicorn back into perfect dour obedience. It would not be the last time that racism worked its way into their orders or treatment. “Conformity is a virtue. Our goddess has always said so. Now, you lot are going to listen to me review everything about the cases with you and the profile that is currently in place. Then, you are going to apply those to your guard work and labor even half as hard as the pegasi and earth pony troops of this city do in solving the case. I will leave you the contact information of Ebony Henbane if any of you want to flood that poor mare’s mail with your crazy theories. Got it? GOT IT?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” chanted all of the unicorns, each wholly drained of enthusiasm for the progress they thought they were making.
“Good,” hissed Valiant. “Now, as I was saying, the offender profile is that of a unicorn, but what we really need to review to see that is all the scenes…”
…
Dear Ebony Henbane,
May the gods find you well. I left off the title of ‘doctor’ because I admittedly do not know if coroners are doctors. I am writing to you after the City Commander Valiant Heart ordered all unicorns in the Manehattan EUP to listen to a meeting. Apparently, many in the city blame us for not doing enough with the crime-solving. Even civilians who have eagerly kept track of the papers and the evidence found are often blaming us and insisting we are not doing enough work. This city is not my home; I am from a little village in the Trotsian mountains that you would not know, so there is no sense in boring you with the name. I say this so that I might apologize in advance if my Equestrian is not very good.
There were some discoveries I felt were greatly overlooked at the meeting. All of them surrounded the idea that the attacker is a unicorn. I know that you are probably skeptical of any revision of this since you have done so much work in creating the profiles and reports we have to work with. I ask that you please read this letter all the way through, though. We may have discovered something important. It has to do with small discrepancies that I am not sure anypony would have noticed and do not blame you for looking over either.
First and foremost: the diagram of the scene with the murdered stallion is what I wish to draw your attention to. Look at the positioning of the head. See how close it is to the bed? The angle of the head to get that impression would have also involved leaning the head in a way that is sort of pushed back against the ground and upside-down. An adult unicorn would have gotten their horn stuck due to both the proximity and the position. Also, this puts the saddlebags upside-down too. Levitating bits into saddlebags in this position does not work; you end up having to levitate any bits put into the saddlebag in place so they do not spill out. It also does not create a very big space to efficiently levitate those bits into the bag, to begin with. This is all because we have clear evidence that the killer was on their back.
Now, I am a unicorn. I know that if you work as a coroner, you must be a fellow unicorn. How hard we are to find in this city! I would like to point out that even if you are not familiar with it, unicorns are not likely to lie down this way. There is a lot of research, both foreign and domestic, that shows unicorns are innately prone to arrange themselves in ways that preserve their horn. This extends to both sitting and sleeping positions, as well as the drastically diminished rate of conventional (physical) hyperactivity and ability to sleep without moving that unicorns have. We do not have any reason to believe that the killer has shown this in some of the scenes discussed.
Due to this, I propose that something entirely different was going on. I propose that the killer lying down wasn’t to obtain the bits and that they grabbed all of the ones they could at an unknown time after getting up. I believe that the behavior we witnessed was a ritualistic one, and in my best guess, it means that the killer was in no hurry to leave. They did not manage to take all of the bits and they even left some tools. Makeup that possibly belonged to them was found in the bathroom, and generally, if most unicorns know the spell, they cast a quick clean-up spell that makes things like that disappear — but traces of magic would then be visible. Maybe the killer was disturbed and fled sometime after they engaged in this ritual.
However, this is not the only evidence that leads me or my fellow unicorn guards to believe we are dealing with something not added to the data we were all presented with. The inability to identify the species components in any of the individual spell’s makeup but the magical signature including pony components stands out as an unusual problem, especially because they were said to rule out other creatures. The tool-work is remarkably amateurish but we have no proof of a magical disability, which would, of course, lead to a known magical signature.
There have been no witness sightings. Nopony reports anypony covered in blood — yes, I know it is likely being magicked away. No racially-motivated reports about unicorns in non-unicorn areas of the city are being invoked despite what the profile says. The killer operates in areas that are working to middle class and filled with mostly earth ponies, pegasi, or low-income immigrants who do not live in the main neighborhoods their kind are often forced into. The stores in this area receive many foreign goods and have access to many other parts of the city, including waterway travel, quite easily. This pony was able to look like they belonged at wharves, near row houses, by apartments, and even among non-pony immigrants.
We know that they are deeply mentally disturbed as an individual. However, they manage not to operate in the daytime. Their life is probably a secret, either intentionally or because others have not realized what they are doing. There are many reasons that they likely operate at night, and I would like to propose one more: they are hiding something, not just that they are a killer, but something they are wearing. The blood imprints show they wear a cloak, one that is either layered or over layers of something else. Traveling cloaks like that are normally worn by outsiders to the city, after all, Manehattan wear is some of the most distinct in the world. I would expect the normal traveler's cloak to be swapped out at one of the thatched-roof inns of Bucklyn. Yet, we know that our killer is intimately familiar with this city — I suggest that they are even a native of it.
Why would they wear something that could make them look out of place? Quite simply, I think it is because it serves a function for them. Why do they appear to go out of the way to dirty their clothes or possibly not take them off at times when it would suit them? I think it is either utility or fetishistic reasons. How hasn’t anypony reported them as abnormal? I think this is because they are in the early years of the onset of their sickness and manage to pass as normal very well. More than that, I think that despite how evil they must be, they have something that is helping them during the day, or something that prevents them from attacking. You noted in your reports that they act in a way that suggests physical confrontation does not really work for them, especially with the stallion. I noticed that in your final report.
I think what you are dealing with is somepony who isn’t a unicorn and who has an artifact. This is why there is an abnormality in the magical makeup and why their aura is unknown. Their artifact helps them with a wide range of things, yet magic that is more natural for unicorns remains quite difficult for them.
We have no positive evidence that the killer is a unicorn and some negative evidence that makes it fairly unlikely that they are. I think that this investigation has limited itself to racial stereotyping based on assumptions of how things usually are. Yes, most ponies who use magic in this way are unicorns. Yes, we have part of the magical results confirming that the killer is a pony. However, we do not have the elements that would confirm they are a unicorn. We have no single witness sighting or piece of bodily evidence other than the sexual traces that they have left on all of the female victims. I believe that this could explain the magical crystals found in all of the blood too. They might be the discharge or waste products from the artifact.
In Equestrian history, I have found stories about a mare named Hydia Invidia. She was a unicorn in the earlier centuries of Equestria’s rule who found an artifact that looked as though ponies of any race could use it. From there, she was able to have her corruption and depravity made manifest. However, the artifact also helped her hide her corruption so that she appeared normal, until Princess Celestia defeated her.
I do not know what the artifact would do. I technically do not know if the Blood Mage has one, but I would say that it is likely that they do, and that ‘Mage’ is a very inappropriate title indeed if they are not a unicorn. Without anypony having seen who the murderer is, we can have no way of guessing its limits or what specifically it helps the killer with. I do think that bringing more magical investigation into the case would help my superior officers. I know not the origin of any artifact, but I do wonder where it is that the killer gets the things used for their attacks. We assume that they have always been a murderer, when they may have started small, as many criminals do. Perhaps they have been a thief of objects before they were a thief of lives.
Sincerely,
Corporal Goldener Schild of the Manehattan EUP