//------------------------------// // 38 - The Banshee // Story: The Hollow Pony // by Type_Writer //------------------------------// “Yeah, this one should work fine. East side of the building, third window from the north end.” Rivet stepped away from the window, while Raindrops nodded behind him. I was still busy checking the straps of my armor, as they worked out the specifics of the plan. Raindrops repeated the location a couple of times, and smiled nervously. “You’ll have your smokescreen...as long as you’re still sure about this?” Rivet chuckled. “I’m sure, though I’m glad you’re tryin’ to dissuade me. Only plan we have, right?” “That still doesn’t mean it’s a good plan,” Raindrops mused sadly. Rivet shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be; just has to work.” He turned to me, and gave me a nod. “Holly, find me a brick or a heavy paperweight or something. I can open this window, but we’re gonna have to smash the one in the other building. Anything small but heavy should do—it’s old glass, it’ll shatter easy.” Small and heavy; I could do that. I started to poke through the room while Rivet gently gave Raindrops’ shoulder a friendly nuzzle. Ponies tended to be very casual about that sort of comforting affection, though it had been rare throughout my journey so far. It wasn’t professional, being that we were technically knights on a mission at the moment, but Rivet could tell Raindrops needed some reassurance. “In case this goes pear-shaped—” Raindrops jabbed him in the breast. “Oh no you don’t! Don’t you dare die doing this, you absolute ass. I’ve already lost two ponies under my command.” Rivet laughed again, even as Raindrops glared at him. “Alright, alright. We’ll come back, safe and sound, and the Banshee will just blow away when we sweep in. Feel better?” “Not really,” Raindrops mumbled. Rivet shrugged. “Them’s the breaks, miss. We’ll die, or we won’t. Not much room in between that, not even these days. All I can promise is that we’ll try our best not to die.” “I hope nopony else dies, or hollows out, or...whatever. All this, just to rescue Trixie, of all mares…” Raindrops muttered with a sigh. “I’ll go tell Roma and Maud, and I’ll send up Posey and Ocellus to watch. They’ll shut the window after you, and they’ll tell me after, so we know to douse the fire.” “Alright, and tell Gilda we’ll be coming in from the west, so we’re not driving uphill into the ghosts. Hopefully that should help her work out her own plan of attack.” As Raindrops left, I noticed a perfect projectile; an old bowling trophy, made of tarnished brass, and shaped like a candlepin bowling ball. It was set on a base, but it still fit fine in my pyromancer’s grasp. Rivet approved as well, when I passed it to him, and he spent a few minutes tossing it from hoof to hoof to get used to the weight while we waited. * * * We actually didn’t notice the smoke until it actually started to block out the light of the sunset; I’d been quietly chatting with Ocellus and Posey, and while we occasionally glanced over to the window, we only saw wisps and heat-shimmer until suddenly dark smoke was billowing up past the window. Rivet cursed, and started to open the window, while our other friends stepped back to watch from the doorway, just in case glass or ghosts fell back into the room. The window opened with a clack, as the paint that had glued it shut suddenly came free, and instantly Rivet was blasted with a cloud of smoke. He leaned back, coughing, but waved me forward. After he cleared his throat, he gave me a smile. “Ready?” In truth, no; I wasn’t ready for any part of this since we left Ponyville, it felt like. I don’t think I was ready for any part of this journey since I woke up, really, despite my best efforts every time. But we had to get moving before Raindrops and Roma ran out of furniture to burn, so I nodded, and Rivet turned back to the window. We could just barely see the gleaming surface of the other window through the dense smokescreen. Thankfully, it seemed like the smoke also warded off the ghosts; maybe it was too dry, or too thick for them to push into, as living mist? It was a shame we didn’t really have any other way to use that knowledge, but it would keep us safe, and hidden, in the meantime. Hopefully, all of them were down there, looking at the fire below, so that our escape went unnoticed. Rivet tossed the brass bowling ball in his hoof one last time, before he set it on the window sill, and turned around. A single, powerful buck from the construction pony turned the trophy into a blur, and the sound of shattering glass followed quickly after. More than just the window; it must have broken something glass inside the room across from us, as well. We both peered through the smoke again afterward, and now the gleaming glass was like teeth, jagged and sharp in the window frame. It had broken into long shards, all pointing towards the point of impact in the middle of the window. Suddenly, I was very glad that Rivet would be the first one through. Speaking of, I gave the stallion space as he stepped back, to give himself a bit of a run-up. He was a large stallion, and while both windows were large, it would be a tight fit. Not to mention the two or three pony-lengths of space between the two buildings, which we were both trying very hard not to think about. He took a few last, deep breaths, and then started galloping.  He leapt off the edge of the window frame and disappeared into the smoke, but the sound of shattering glass and cursing from within told me that he’d made it that far, at least. I peered through the smoke once more, and tried to spot him, but all I could see was that almost all of the shards hanging from the top of the frame were now gone. “Are-are you okay?” “Spawn of a bitch!” He responded, then a moment of grunting later, he added, “Yeah, I’m—agh—It’s fine, come on through. Mother pus bucket!” That wasn’t exactly encouraging…but I didn’t really have any other options. I mimicked how he’d done it, and took a few steps back from the window to get a good gallop ready. I nodded nervously one last time at Posey and Ocellus, who gave me their own reassuring—albeit nervous—smiles, and began to gallop forward, until my forehooves kissed the window frame. My hind hooves joined them, and then I sprung forward through the smoke, leaping towards the dim outline of the window. I had a sickening moment of fear, that I’d miss the frame entirely, and I almost did miss it; I landed in the frame of the window itself, and sharp, stabbing pain sliced up my hind leg as I flopped forward into the room. Glass crackled and crunched under my armored body as I rolled across it, and cold blood spattered across my belly from my lacerated leg. But my ichor still had the consistency of sludge, so the wound only spilled reddish-black blood, as opposed to gushing bright crimson lifeblood across the floor. Speaking of, Rivet had fared much worse than I had. Even as I struggled to stand on my slashed leg, I noticed two long shards of glass stabbing out of his barrel. Clearly, he’d landed directly on them, which had snapped the shards out of the frame, and nearly turned his defenestration into a disembowelment. He was trying not to shift around too much, and risk pushing the broken glass deeper; or worse, risk snapping part of it off inside his body. “Careful, be—agh!—careful, dammit…” I shuffled across the glass on the floor, as I used the window frame to pull myself up to my hooves, and managed to stab my forehoof with another remaining shard. I cursed quietly to myself, as I clutched the wounded leg to my breast, but at least I was standing. I could make out a silhouette through the smoke, and while I couldn’t tell if it was Posey or Ocellus, it didn’t really matter at the moment. “W-we’re through. G-go, we’ll be alright, as soon as we p-pull the glass out…” The silhouette visibly shuddered and winced, but nodded, and the window slid shut once more. We were alone, and I pulled the curtain across to cover the broken window. Hopefully the smoke would keep the ghosts from noticing it; this building wasn’t warded, and we weren’t sure how well the ghosts could hear with a roaring fire below, so any kind of stealth we could maintain would only help us. My wounds were deep, but they were only slashes; I was bleeding a decent amount, but slowly, and while they hurt, there was no glass in the wound. I’d be fine with some bandages and whatever bit of liquid sunlight had filled my flask, but I needed to help Rivet extract his own shards first, before we could tend to my comparatively lesser wounds. Gently, I rolled Rivet onto his back, and even that motion caused a fresh wave of blood to ebb out from around the glass shards. He swore, but bit his lip until that was bleeding too, to try and stay quiet. “Careful, careful…” He growled again, warning me as I wrapped my magical grip around one of the large shards. While I much preferred this method to pulling it out with my teeth, it was harder to get a solid grip on the slick glass, and it was more delicate than I was expecting. I actually gripped the shard too hard at first, and with a crack, the shard split down the middle. That earned me a fresh list of curses from Rivet, as two shards had become three. “S-sorry! I’m sorry—” “Just be careful, dammit…” I was, indeed, a bit more careful as I pulled out the glass shards, one by one. RIvet passed out as I was pulling out the third one, and I was feeling a bit light-headed myself. When I was done, I tossed the bloody shard onto the wooden floor, grabbed the nape of the large stallion’s neck in my teeth, and pulled him, as hard as I could, out of the room and down the hallway. We left a trail of blood, I’m sure, but we were out of that room with all of the broken glass. As luck would have it, the room I dragged Rivet’s cold body into had a few racks of moth-eaten clothes sitting inside, which I eagerly yanked off the hangers and pressed against our wounds. Actually tying sleeves and ties and skirts into knots to hold our makeshift bandages in place proved unsuccessful; I couldn’t focus, and I was losing my grip on my magic. My hooves shook as cold overtook them, and soon, it all went dark, as I collapsed alongside Rivet’s corpse. * * * I woke up first, which was new for me. Usually I was the one who had suffered the most grievous wounds, and so I was the last one to wake up from our brief flirtations with oblivion. But when I shook myself awake, fur crusty with dried blood and ichor, Rivet was right where I’d left him. I could feel his fire, slow and gentle, sealing his wounds and replenishing his lost blood, but it would be a little while yet until he awoke. I did what I could to hurry it along, by properly bandaging his wounds to hold them closed. My own wounds were already mostly sealed, but I could examine the new scars through my thin fur, at least. I’d actually gotten slashed up a bit more while leaping through the window than I’d first thought, but the leg wound had been the worst of them all; no wonder it had drowned out the rest of my scrapes and stabs. Still, pulling the smaller shards of broken glass from my frogs gave me something to do, and I used the time to try and focus on those wounds. Without Zecora, or even Trixie, I was on my own regarding Pyromancy. Meadowbrook had spoken of healing pyromancies, back in Baton Verte, and they were part of the potion I carried with me now. Surely I could work out some fundamentals, in the time I had? As it turned out, no, it was a bit more complicated than that. While I could feel my fire, and even kind of direct it around my body a bit, it didn’t seem to speed up my healing at all. Either I wasn’t feeling the right emotion, or I could only heal others, and I didn’t want to test that idea on Rivet when I still wasn’t sure what I was doing. At worst, I could drain his fire into myself by accident, and turn him hollow before he ever awoke. I resigned myself to waiting for him, and I watched the hallway through a crack in the door in the meantime. No ghosts came to investigate, or if they had, then they had done so while both of us were dead. Still, I was hopeful that we had somehow slipped out of the building undetected, thanks to the smokescreen. It would be incredibly frustrating if we awoke to find this building had been surrounded as well, but it wasn’t warded like the library was; if they were aware of our presence, then surely they would just steal our fire and leave us hollow. When RIvet awoke, he did so with a start and a gasp. His hoof slapped at his belly in panic, but when he found only dried, matted fur and a clotted bandage, he let out a sigh of relief. “Ugh...Holly?” His voice was a little more rough. Deeper and growling, but undeniably still Rivet. Hollowing took its payment for death reversed, as it always did. Thankfully, that seemed to be the only thing it had done to him, so far. What had it done to me, I wondered? Surely I didn’t have many of those deaths left before my sanity was whittled to nothing. “I’m here,” I murmured, my voice quiet but clear. “I dr-dragged you to another room, so w-we could hide, before I collapsed m-myself.” “Agh...everything still aches, it’s been a long damned time since I died last. Forgot how cold it was…” Rivet rubbed his muzzle with a shuddering hoof, before he started to gather his legs under himself and stand. “Thanks Holly, good thinking. Are we clear?” I nodded. “I haven’t s-seen any ghosts. I think we g-got away.” “Good. Let’s get moving, can’t keep the others waiting. Spent too long dead on the floor in here already.” RIvet shook his head one last time to clear the fog from his mind, and then moved to the door beside me. We both peeked out, and when nothing leapt for our faces, we opened the door the rest of the way. Rivet took the lead again, and I fell into step behind the muscled stallion. * * * We slipped out of the building easily enough; we peered around corners at the ghosts, but they were entirely focused on the library once more. We were always careful to keep as much of a building as we could in between ourselves and them, and that allowed us to slip away into the city undetected. We had to loop around a bit to find the path Gilda, Raindrops, Star Bright, and myself had taken through the city originally. The second group had taken a different, slightly faster route, and that meant they had avoided the hovering automobile that our first group had seen. That meant that we were not only relying on my memory, but my memory in reverse, which was much less useful. Still, we only took a few wrong turns, and found the auto-mobile eventually. When we spotted it, Rivet was the first to approach. “You’re sure this is it?” I looked over the craft. While I’d only really given it a cursory glance before, as one would to a pile of scrap metal on the side of the road, the faded paint and four large steel hoops were too distinctive to forget. Three of the hoops were mostly level with the ground, with two on either side of the navigation wheel, and one in front at a slanted angle. The one in back was entirely perpendicular to the ground, and must have been somehow used to impart forward momentum on the craft. I nodded. “Y-yeah. Either this is it, or...there was t-two ponies with the same m-mad idea.” “Probably more,” Rivet said, chuckling, as he moved forward and carefully began to climb behind the wheel of the hovercraft. “This thing’s big enough, and complex enough, that there was probably a team of ponies trying to get this thing flying. They must’ve had some success, since I don’t see a workshop anywhere around here, and I doubt they’d just drag this thing around.” I glanced around, and noted that Rivet was correct; this was an outlying urban area of the city, with small houses and a school built from dilapidated wood, alongside a park full of dead grass. They probably could’ve been using that field for test drives, but even then, this auto-mobile was parked a good distance from there. By the time I looked back at him, Rivet had clambered back over the seat to the exposed engine, and was gently tugging at tubes and wires to find out where they connected. “Okay…okay, yeah, I see what they did here…this is basically an old-fashioned steam boiler that pumps the steam out through the tubes into the big metal hoops...the actual engine just heats the boiler and keeps it cycling, because the prismapetrol runs alongside the steam and conducts electricity...it’s not cutting-edge, they must’ve been trying to do it on the cheap, and that means this thing’s covered in weird patch jobs and they’ve had to build around that central boiler…” He trailed off, then nodded. “I’m barely a mechanic, and this is more a job for a plumber...they left a toolkit here too, probably for more patch jobs on the fly. But, all of the prismapetrol’s basically sludge in the tubes. Gonna have to clean that out and get more to replace it...I can get this running again though, I think.” “D-do you need any help cleaning out w-what’s left in there?” I asked, peering at a brown fluid that seemed to be oozing out of the edges of the steel hoops and into the gutter. It reminded me of oil paint, but paint where a pony had mixed all of their colors together into a single disgusting shade of brown. Rivet popped open a sealed, steel weather-proof case, and pulled out a loop of black rubber. “Nah, they left enough spare tubing that I can just rip ‘em out and replace them. Hopefully, the pressure should pump out whatever’s still in the engine once I open a gap in the system, but it’s definitely not gonna like it when we start this thing up. Expect a lot of pops and banging as the little sludgy pockets combust. Hopefully that doesn’t tear open the lines, but eh, we’ll see…in the meantime, take a look around the neighborhood, see if you can find a can of prisma that’s still sealed. The more the better, I don’t know how much this thing needs.” I nodded, and set off into the neighborhood to search. After wandering down a street or two, it became very easy to find the houses I should be investigating, since they were usually the ones with large yards filled with long-dead grass, and ugly stains that ran down the gutters like faded brown ink. Usually, the source was a shed alongside the house, filled with dull red canisters, and rust had punched holes in all but a few of them, aided by the caustic oily fluid within. Prismapetrol was...I struggled to remember, because it was relatively new. Liquid rainbows had long been distilled in Cloudsdale, of course, to varying degrees of purity and intensity. The most common form of the fluid was lighter and thinner, like dyed water, but the magic within kept the different colors separate to create rainbows. That fluid was pumped into clouds, and somehow was only released when the clouds were fully rained out, to signal the cloud was dry and would dissipate soon. It was safe to touch and ingest—in fact, I’d even heard of some pegasi using the stuff as hot sauce, though nopony was quite sure what the long-term effects of that were. But the factory we’d passed through in the fallen cloud city was where they’d continued experimenting with that mysterious magical liquid. There, they’d distilled it further and further, testing new additives and processes just to see what that did to it. Sometimes, the mixes were highly flammable, even explosive, while other times they were inert but fantastic conductors. Prismapetrol was a refined version of the fluid that served as both while still being technically safe to handle and transport, though it was highly recommended that only Pegasi do so in order to keep it stable. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean it was safe. While nopony had died due to ingesting it—even the rainbow-drinkers had their limits when it came to industrial runoff—it was definitely a magical hazard, and almost certainly poisonous. These ponies’ yards had long died from the fuel getting into the soil, and if the land weren’t already cursed to death unending, it was possible the ground here would be permanently poisoned. At least that meant I didn’t have to search terribly hard to find little stockpiles of the cans, though I noted a distressing amount of small craters, obliterated sheds, and half-burned houses as I wandered through the neighborhood. Eventually, I found a sturdy-looking sealed can that was pretty much empty, and I was able to consolidate a few other smaller cans into that one without much difficulty. While the prismapetrol looked noticeably darker when I poured it in, it sloshed around fine, and I wasn’t reduced to a reddish-black smear when I shook it. After however long it took me to search the scattered houses and sheds, I had most of a large can of rainbow fuel, and headed back to Rivet. When I arrived, I noticed the brown trail in the gutter had grown to a disgusting smear, and a sludgy river ran down the street. Rivet himself had a splash of the stuff across his breast, and he’d smeared it afterward, maybe to try and get it off, before he’d given up entirely. More smears covered the hover-craft, and a bunch of the components had been stripped out of the engine and laid in mostly-orderly lines on the sidewalk, similarly smeared with brown gunk. But the engine itself looked a bit less broken, with several more shiny components in place of cracked ones. The tubes had been entirely replaced, and the old ones lay in a heap in a road, with more brown gunk slowly leaking from the ends. Rivet looked up as I approached, and finished tightening a pipe before he set down his wrench. “Whatcha got?” I shook the can gently, just enough so that he could get an idea of how much it contained. “M-most of a can? There’s not m-much left, I brought all I could f-find.” “Well, we’ll see,” Rivet said, as he scratched his chin with a hoof. Then he realized his hoof was covered in brown goop, and he swore as he realized he’d just smeared it across his chin as well. “Ah, dammit, this stuff...it gets everywhere, and the little squalls of rain that keep passing through just make it worse. The stuff never dries.” We spent a little while after that just repairing the last few leaks in the system. Most of the mechanics of the auto-mobile were way over my head, but I could understand when something was supposed to be flowing but wasn’t. I got brown goop smeared across myself too, and I would have been worried about how poisonous it was if we weren’t both already undead. Neither of us had any idea how it was actually supposed to fly, though; we could see where the tubes connected, but not why it worked, or what the power was supposed to do. After the last tube was screwed in and the last bolt tightened, Rivet had me pour the prismapetrol into the brass fuel tank. He winced when I splashed some of it, since we didn’t have much to waste, but he seemed satisfied when the can was empty. “Okay, that looks like just enough. No leaks either, thank the sun. We should be good to go now.” I climbed down into the seat just behind the pilot’s seat, and Rivet took the wheel, since he’d used heavy machinery before at least. “Anything else, b-before we start it?” “I don’t think so…” Rivet mumbled, as he looked over the control panel. There were dials, pedals, levers, knobs, all probably important in their own way, but neither of us had any idea how. He glanced back. “Only thing I can think of is that we’re probably not gonna be able to hear each other. That one hoop back there is basically right behind us, and even if this thing ran like it was new, I’m gonna guess it would be loud. Really loud. Any last words before we maybe explode?” I swallowed nervously. I didn’t want to explode. For a moment, I entertained the idea of walking back to the library, while Rivet took this bizarre auto-mobile into battle...but I didn’t want to leave him to fight the Banshee all by himself. “I hope this w-works. And that w-we don’t explode.” Rivet laughed heartily. The noise rattled more in his chest now. “Heh! Me too, filly, me too.” He flicked a couple likely looking-switches, and I heard the fuel tank gurgle behind me as the prismapetrol started to cycle through the system. Rivet grabbed a pull starter with his hoof, and took a deep breath. “Alrighty! Let’s get this gizmo started.” He yanked the cord back, and the engine coughed and sputtered, while the pipes gurgled. The rope retracted, and he yanked it again. This time, the engine roared to life, and a cloud of black smoke belched out of the top of the boiler. We glanced back at it in confusion, but steam started to whistle out of it a moment later as the engine sputtered. After a moment, the pipes around the steel hoops whistled as the steam ran through them, and escaped the holes, until clouds of steam started to wheeze and flow out into the hoops themselves. As lightning crackled across the engine, I understood what the prismapetrol was for. It corralled the steam into those hoops, and didn’t allow it to escape. Instead, it caused it to swirl, spinning faster and faster, until each of the four hoops had a miniature cyclone swirling at their center. All of a sudden, bolts of lightning crackled across all of the hoops at once, and the auto-mobile jerked as the air above was slammed into the street underneath us with the force of a hurricane being funneled through the hoops. We were suddenly in the air, and our breaths caught in our throat as we bounced on a violent cushion of air, until we came to a hovering stop about a body-length above the street. Discarded parts, junk tubing, and loose papers blew around the street as the craft hovered in place. Rivet shouted something back, but the cyclones ripped the air from his lips, as if we were flying through a storm. It felt like we were riding atop a thundercloud, with the hoops full of angry sparking vortices of vapor blowing the wind around. My best guess was that he said something about how this should work against ghosts made of mist, and even then, that was mostly wishful thinking on my part. Rivet looked forward again, and pressed his hoof down on a pedal while grasping the steering wheel firmly. Even that little bit of impulse was enough for the storm behind our heads to turn deafening, and we leapt forward down the street. We could’ve stopped there, allowed Rivet to get a handle on the controls, but there was something intoxicating that we could feel about this machine, and the sheer power that shook the frame we were sitting in. Or maybe it was because the air was actually getting sucked out of our lungs and making us kind of loopy. Either way, RIvet chose to spin the wheel and slide around the corner at the top speed possible, and we were thrown against the side of the craft as it bounced off a wall, before we sped down the next street. We would figure it out on the way to the library, Rivet had apparently decided, and I had absolutely no intention of dissuading him. * * * Among the things that we worked out about the craft, as we flew down the streets on a corralled storm, was why the design had remained a unique prototype. I was already lightheaded from the airflow problems, and it was entirely possible that we both would have passed out already if we’d actually needed to breathe still. It was also deafeningly loud, and not just for us; we’d blown past several shops loud and fast enough that the ancient glass had shattered in the frame, and everywhere we went, we blew a bulwark of trash before us that scattered high into the sky, only to get soaked by the rain and come down heavier behind us. It was also hard to tell if the auto-mobile was just fragile to begin with, whether time had done damage that we hadn’t seen, or if we had just repaired something wrong. We hadn’t made it more than a mile before the machine started to list to the left, because that turbine had started to spray green sparks into the stormcloud at the center. Something was clearly wrong with the crystalline wire on that side, and I had no idea how to fix that. It kind of looked like it was melting, and if it turned to slag entirely, what would happen to the storm contained within? Between that and the alarming rattling sensation that seemed to be getting worse the longer the engine ran, I started to worry that the machine wouldn’t last long enough for us to get to the library. But as I saw the great stone monument of Mt. Verhoof Place, and the library beside it, I felt as though maybe, just maybe, we would actually make it there and save the day. Our angle was wrong for a sharp turn, so Rivet banked right around the monument, then slammed the wheel back to turn the hover-craft towards the front of the library. Scattered ghosts were upon us already, almost certainly attracted by the noise, but they feared our roaring turbines, and the few that attacked anyways were sucked through and spat out behind us, looking confused and disoriented. As we faced the main force of the ghostly army, I saw the Banshee herself in the center of them all. It was hard to tell from here, but I had no doubt that she was surprised. I wondered, just for a moment, what she was singing as she saw us. Could the others hear confusion in her song? Then we slammed through the banks of ghosts like a ship crashing into a sand dune. Mist exploded around us as it was drawn through the turbines, and the Banshee just barely leapt to the side as we scattered the army, and just kept going. But then, we were going too fast. We’d expected to slow down going through them, and now it was too late to turn. Rivet tried, bless him, he really did, but all he could do was spin the wheel and slam on the braking pedal. It still wasn’t enough to keep us from slamming the hover-craft into the face of the library with a sound like a lightning storm splitting a sky made of bricks. To the craft’s credit, it didn’t completely shatter into tiny pieces. It stayed mostly in one piece as it slammed against the building, and instead of crumpling or splitting apart, it bounced back and up. We were both thrown bodily from the auto-mobile, and I wondered for a moment if perhaps those straps attached to the seats might have had some sort of function to prevent exactly this. Then, I slammed into the cobbled street belly-down, and had just enough time to gasp and throw my hooves up before the bulk of the hover-craft landed on my back. Pain spiked through my body as the fish threatened to escape my throat again, and I suddenly lost all feeling below my belly. But the craft settled without completely crushing me, and I let my hooves drop as I gasped quietly in pain. My head slumped to the street, and my vision swam as I looked around. My eyes quickly found Rivet...and standing over him, the Banshee. He hadn’t landed any better than I had, it seemed, though he hadn’t had the wrecked auto-mobile land on top of him. Instead, he was trying to crawl away from the red smear he’d left on the street where he landed, and more importantly, the Banshee. The ghosts hadn’t avoided our attack, but it seemed like she had just barely managed to do so, and now sought vengeance as her army pulled itself back together all around us. Either because Rivet had landed closer, or because I was thoroughly trapped, she seemed intent on slaying him first. Rivet, the strong construction pony, could only whimper in pain as she drew in close, following his trail of blood to the broken stallion himself. She held up a forehoof as she paused just above him, and instead of a knife like her followers, Sweetie Belle’s own hoof coalesced into a wickedly-sharp point. It seemed to slice through the air itself as she brought her ethereal hoof-blade down into Rivet’s back, and the stallion gasped and coughed blood as she stabbed right through him, into the street. If that wasn’t enough, she smirked, and wisps of pink fire swirled up through her hoof into the mist that made up her body. Just like Apple Bloom had to Zecora, Sweetie Belle was draining Rivet of his fire, his Equinity, and I was helpless to stop her. Rivet gasped and shriveled before my eyes, as his life was drained, and everything the stallion had been was stolen from him. In seconds, he was a lifeless husk of a pony—barely a broken Hollow, pinned to the street to bleed out, dumb and mad. The Banshee turned to me as she ripped the tip of her hoof free from Rivet’s crawling corpse, and she started to sing that horrible song once again as she approached me. Then there was a blur as something shot past me, and Gilda tackled the Banshee as much as one could tackle a goddess made of semi-solid mist. The yearning black knife was unsheathed, held high in her claw as Gilda tried to stab at the Banshee, while both fell together onto the street. The Banshee was quick, and evasive; she nearly slipped out of Gilda’s grasp, but all the gryphon hen needed to do was land a single blow. I knew she had done it when I heard the Banshee scream. Gilda was thrown to the side and out of sight, but the knife stayed, buried up to the hilt in the Banshee’s shoulder. She writhed and screamed, louder than any dying ghost I had slain so far, as the dark crawled across her body. It would take her soon, it would sunder her spirit from this realm and draw her into the knife. Good, I thought. That’s payback for Rivet. But she was stronger than the other ghosts, and more powerful. As she screamed, the Banshee grabbed at the knife, and ripped it out of her own shoulder. All around us, the ghosts of Baltimare suddenly found themselves being drawn into the Banshee’s body, like they were nothing but fuel for her own ghostly fire, wisps of smoke being pulled through a chimney. As they dissolved, the Banshee herself grew stronger, cannibalizing the spirits of her followers to save herself. Slowly, somehow, the dark began to recede. Not because she was stronger than it, but because the Banshee was overfeeding it. I could feel the souls of Baltimare, the fire in the fog, all being drawn towards this central point. It tugged at my own soul as well, and I held it tightly to keep it safe, but the wild spirits all around us didn’t have the same strength that a physical body provided. They were consumed by the Banshee, all to feed the dark faster than it could consume them, so that she could isolate it. The Banshee dropped the knife onto the cobblestones with a clatter, and her hoof instead pressed against her cursed shoulder, as though she were trying to staunch the bleeding. But after a moment, I realized, no, that wasn’t her intention. As she pulled at her ethereal shoulder, she ripped her own diseased leg free, and it was suddenly separated from her ghostly body, corruption of the dark and all. She let it fall as soon as it was fully disconnected, and the dark surged back, consuming the discarded limb in seconds. Her eyes followed it, as the limb was dissolved and pulled into the knife as a hair-thin strand of abyssal energy, and when it was finished, the Banshee picked up the knife once more. Fire surged around us, powerful, like Celestia or even Pinkie Pie was suddenly here before us. The last of the ghosts were consumed, and now only the Banshee remained, holding the knife in her hoof, a maddened scowl upon her muzzle. She held it in her hoof as her mist coalesced, and she summoned fire, even in her ethereal form. That fire wreathed the knife, fighting against the dark contained within. I heard a whining noise as the dark within strained to escape, tried to consume the fire, but couldn’t, because it wasn’t tainted by the dark anymore. Eventually, it just tried to keep itself intact, and it couldn’t even do that; it failed, and failed spectacularly, as the knife exploded suddenly into shards of broken crystal, which punched holes in the steel frame that was crushing my body and missed me by hoofwidths. As the fire faded from the square, the Banshee sagged; she was still missing her forehoof, and loose mist bled from the stump like smoke, as if the fire inside her had just been snuffed. The broken, useless hilt of the knife fell to the street, and the Banshee glanced at it, before looking at her own hoof. Then, with one last glance at the glow of the distant sunset through the thin rain above, she swept away, like a fogbank that was pulled by a rope. I saw it leave the square, and then the Banshee was gone. Not dead. Most certainly not dead. But she was defeated, at least for now, and her ghost army with her. Out of my range of vision, I heard the library doors slam open, and then swooping wings as Raindrops leapt out of the building. She flew to Rivet, still hollow and bleeding on the ground. And as my own injuries began to overtake me once more, I heard the others galloping out of the building towards us, as well as Gilda trying to find a good place to grab onto the wreck that was still crushing my body. As darkness crept in, I could only look at Raindrops, staring down at Rivet’s Hollow form, lying broken on the street.