//------------------------------// // (Past Chapter 36) Three Curses // Story: The Unique Properties of Dark Magic // by Shadestyle //------------------------------// "Go away!" Blister shouts, huddling in the corner of his cell with his eyes shut as two confused guards try to push a tray of food under the bars. 'That dumpy fake-dragon pony said I'd be out in a month after they did "the paperwork," but who cares! He turned me into a pony! It's not like I can just leave like this!' the dragon growls as his stomach growls. He glances at the tray. Not a gemstone in sight, instead, the tray is covered with a little carton of rainbow-colored juice, a bunch of smiling flowers, some bright pink mushrooms, and a cookie with fruit in it. To the side, there's a bowl of thick-looking hay stalks. He grits his teeth, and glares at the guards, but he doesn't feel very intimidating. "I said bring me some gems, I'm not eating your prissy pony food!" he shouts, turning around with a huff. He doesn't notice the two dragon-like guards looking at one another in abject confusion. "You want to tell him, or should I?" one of em says. "He'll figure it out," the other one shrugs, before walking over to where he was sitting before, the faint clip-clop of talons echoing out as he settles down and grabs a crystal, swiping across its surface to see if there's any good news on the network. Blister ignores the dumb ponies, being exactly the sort of dragon who is young enough to ignore whatever he's told, and old enough to only believe what he sees with his own two eyes. He had no clue how all the ponies around him ended up looking exactly like real dragons, but he was sure it was some kind of trick. Maybe they got some prissy dragons to pretend to be guards for them or something. His stomach growled again, and the sickly sweet tray of pony food started to grow tempting. He refused to look at the two guards as he approached the tray clumsily, like his legs weren't the length he thought they aught to be. "Just pretend you're taking a big bite of diamond," Blister mutters quietly, so quietly that he's sure those guards don't hear him. Closing his eyes tight, he leans down and takes a bite of a random item on the tray, preparing for the horrible taste of-? His eyes shoot open. This stuff tastes amazing! It's spicy and salty and as savory as can be! A sample of the rainbow juice reveals that it's some kind of warm, steaming and salty beverage, and a bite of the cookie unleashes little explosions of fruity flavor with every chew! The two Longma guards look at the dragon prisoner chowing down desperately on the tray of food. It was the same thing they brought him yesterday, rose-quartz, pink opals, a thick graphite crucible of molten salt, and a bowl of red-hot Longma-style rebar, all of it deep fried and enchanted until any creature could feasibly consume the normally inedible meal, so long as they had the heat tolerance for it, at least. As soon as the prisoner finishes voraciously devouring everything, they look at the guards, their eyes unconsciously sliding up to some random spot above the two Longma, and fear and shame both crop up as the dragon turns away with an annoyed huff of fire, crawling awkwardly back onto the cot in the corner of the room. Sure enough, a month later, Blister was released, and when he looked hesitant to go back to the dragon lands as a "pony", a suite was assigned to the drake, much to his begrudging consternation. He wasn't able to see the golems that followed him everywhere as he aimlessly wandered around the mostly empty halls of Hidden Palace. Even when spying on him, sometimes right in front of his eyes, he wasn't able to notice them and whenever he heard the humming from their levitation, he attributed it to a fly or some other kind of bug. Weiss chortles through a mouthful of popcorn. "Oh, oh, he finally found some 'gems', Luna, watch this," the sage exclaims over the screen he uses to display the dragon's punishment to her on one of her visits. She watches as the dragon tries to quietly approach a crate filled with hay, one of the old shipments from Equestria. Princess Luna suspected that Weiss had intentionally left it there, considering its unusual location in the middle of one of the tunnels. "Weiss, this feels a bit wrong," she muses quietly, trying to get his attention, only to get the bag of popcorn passed to her. Weiss smiles, and cuts her a look that is filled with a twinkling light of mischief. "Come on, he broke into a pony's house, screamed the two mares living there out of their home, and then tried to rip up the walls for his little horde. He'll learn his lesson fast, and he'll never forget it, doing things my way." His tone turns a bit darker. "Besides, it's good fun. Nobody's getting hurt who doesn't deserve it, after all." Luna withholds her comment as she watches the dragon glance from side to side, before grabbing a clawful of hay and stuffing it into his mouth, chomping down hard. Weiss laughs uproariously as Blister over the golemic recording spits out the hay and looks at it like it betrayed him, rubbing his jaw with slight pain over how hard he chomped his teeth together, and how terrible it must have tasted to him. As the dragon stomps away in frustration over the 'gems' that his 'pony teeth' couldn't bite through, and how awful they tasted, "dry and chalky", Blister complained, something about the mood strikes Luna in an odd way, and she supposes, perhaps, it's a little funny. At least Weiss seemed happy, even if he was clearly trying to hide his true dreams from her lately, and only using heavily isolated dream crystals for their nightly talks when he was in one of his artificial dreams. With an internal sigh, she laughs a bit, if only because Weiss is. Weiss Noir awoke with a strangled scream, magic flying from his body as he blindly attacked everything around him. The steel tomb he was sealed in began to deform and black smoke rose from the cracks and seams, before slowly unlatching with a hiss. As it opened, Weiss was revealed, his ever-present smirk a mainstay of the new and improved dark lord, who walked out into the vast, opulent room he had made his own as if nothing was wrong. He told Luna that it was for the aesthetic, that the steel tomb and the large, cathedral-like bedroom were for ambiance, and to a degree, that was true. However, to a more important degree, the room was a deception. Its size served to hide in some respect the sheer amount of dream-crystals embedded in the walls, ceilings, and floors. He refused to sleep outside of a virtual dream nowadays. Nightmares were a nightly presence, and Luna had proven to be a potential threat to his mind and plans, with her intense and constant scrutiny of his behavior and moods. Both were problems solved with some cleverly designed crystals. Ones that both sealed his dreams off from the outside world, but more importantly, were able to give the illusion of peaceful, if particularly deep sleep. She was no fool, but she was unwilling to confront him about it, even if she suspected that the placid dreams she detected on her nightly prowls were a falsehood. Likewise, the tomb-like structure of his room was important as well. In order to live an exceedingly long time in pursuit of revenge, the most important thing was of course, to survive. With the Shadow Guard abolished due to a lack of members, he found himself with no other option but to increase his paranoia even further. Air, food and water were now isolated systems inside his room, and a Shadow Clone was used before his one and only meal each day to check for whatever poison could somehow make its way into the carefully sequestered meals and water supply. He rarely left it physically, at this juncture. Weiss cracked his neck with a smile. Today was a very good day indeed. It was the day he would capture "Mercy", Sombra's mysterious ally. All thanks to one very treacherous pony, who saw fit to tell him where to go. Bruto smiled as he bowed before Lord Weiss. "Of course, my lord. If there is anything you can trust, it is that I have taken to live in your kingdom perhaps the best of all. I revel in the tenants of this society, and wish only to see it become what it could be. I know Longma, and thus, I know when someone is merely pretending." Weiss nodded, chin on his hands as he eagerly listened to Bruto explain how he found the location of Chrysalis's hive, and by extension, Sombra's cohort. "It was simple. I just looked for the most placid Longma in any given place, and... Maybe it's a bit crude, but I beat them nearly to death. A true Longma is filled with joy and happiness in such a conflict, and a pretender... Is not. It was of no consequence, to get them to confess the location of the hive, and, with a bit of digging of my own, I confirmed it," he explains with a placid smile. Of course, what he didn't mention was the fact that he was lying through his teeth. It was a shard of Corrupt Crystal, and a healthy dose of mind control from it that gave Bruto knowledge of the hive's location, and a tracker, something he wouldn't know how to make without the data he stole, was the method by which he confirmed it. "I see..." Lord Weiss muses, scratching his nose idly. "My lord, I would like to ask a favor of you, if I might," Bruto interjects, bringing the sage's fleeting attention back to him. "Let me fight them, when you go to finish this gruesome task. Let me join in the battle to come," he says with a malicious smile. Weiss smirks. The auburn longma is many things, but difficult to read... is not one of them. Weiss Noir's talent allowed him to sense the weaknesses of others, their darker aspects, and to him, the brutish Longma was practically an open book. He radiated deceit, treachery, and bloodlust into the room, until the sage could practically smell it. That besides, Weiss had already checked the pony's browser history, as were the benefits of a technology driven dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise. The pony was obsessed with the sort of sneaky ploys and mindgames that worked oh so well in fiction, something which seemed contradictory to his Cutie Mark, a pair of hoof-fitting boxing gloves. At least, until a cautious eye was able to spot the imprint of metal horseshoes hidden inside the gloves. "Bruto, come now. I have so few of my precious ponies. I cannot risk a single one," Weiss croons sweetly. "And with a pony of your loyalty... I need you here, where I can keep you safe," he finishes, feeling Bruto's emotions go from eager bloodlust to pure disgust towards him. 'I wonder what I'll learn, when I decide to take a closer look at your actions, my little pony?' The sage wonders, dismissing the angered stallion, who silently leaves, presumably planning some sort of revenge. Weiss smiled at the memory. The schadenfreude was delectable, and the knowledge? Exquisite. He watched as, with a hiss, several bottles began to float out of one of the nearby walls. Each one was filled to the brim with Vancian Magic, painstakingly stored night after night in virtual dreams. Now, however, he had taken to storing spells even during the day. Any day when he wasn't directly needed to assist in a matter, he was storing spells in liquid time extracted from Frozen Stone, a magical type of rock found deep underground, and any night he wasn't sleeping normally to give his mind rest, he was in a Virtual Dream, storing even more spells in his sleep. He rarely drank them anymore, either. The fact of the matter was, Weiss Noir didn't need them on a day to day basis like he did while Sombra was free and stalking the land in the hunt for his realm. It meant he could store even more spells away, only using the Shadow Clone technique to keep him protected from whatever would threaten him on a day to day basis. Assassins didn't bother to try their hooves at getting into his inner sanctum when their target walked around arrogantly without so much as a guard to protect him during the day, after all. They just needed to find a way to kill him before his 'Emergency Teleport' whisked him away from whatever deadly act befell him at any given moment. "I should send Pure Platinum a fruit basket some time," Weiss mused to himself as he drank the last bottle of Stoppered Time, and absorbed the last spell into himself that he would need for the day. With that done, he walked to the vault doors, and began to slowly open them, one after another, brushing thin chains out of the way as he walked across the room. Anti-teleportation wards were expensive and unreliable, but physically blocking the end-location of a teleport? Far more effective, and achievable by simply filling the room with something durable enough, hence the thin chains draping from every inch of the ceiling in his little bunker. With one last hiss, the door opened, and Weiss's Shadow Clone exited it, prepared to make today a rather productive one. Today, he would be turning over a rock, and seeing what skitters out from under it. A variety of artificial entities followed behind him as he calmly walked up to the towering hive. All of the entities were modeled after various suits of armor, or thin, silken sacks of squirming bugs. These were his new replacement for the Shadow Guard. He refused to let any Longma take up guard duties now beyond managing prisoners and keeping the peace indirectly, so something had to come to replace it. That something was Wannabeetles and Golems. The latter, he was able to maintain production of by bringing on some Earth Ponies from Equestria, and selling them secrets of crystal magic in exchange for labor to supplement what few Longma there still were. The latter, likewise, were garnered by selling the secrets to breeding the Wannabeetles to a select few members of the nobility, in exchange for a constant supply of the magical mimicry bugs. The thick fog of love that Weiss had expected to come in contact with wasn't there, or if it was, he couldn't sense it. In fact, he couldn't sense any changelings at all. His golems, which he personally had control of through his Corrupt Crystals, also failed to see any of the bug-pony monsters as they flitted through the hive. What they did find, however, was exactly what he had been promised. Revenge, in some small part. On one of the floating view screens, he could see objects flying around Mercy, the Great Snake that served as Sombra's royal doctor and scientist. An individual Sombra had only recruited after he summoned Weiss, and began being influenced by the sage's ideas. The snake was stuffing bags with notes, instruments, and more, and somehow, through a process Weiss wasn't quite sure of, the objects almost seemed to move of their own accord, and his eyes slid off of them when he tried to focus too hard on what was allowing the snake to seemingly levitate the things she scrambled to pack. Shaking his head to clear the small confusion, he felt hatred boiling up inside him. "It's incredible... I'm finally beginning to understand hate on an entirely new level," he mused, realizing that this hatred was entirely unlike the other forms he experienced. This new flavor of hate was almost like anticipation, or perhaps even happiness. Without a doubt, it felt good, imagining what would come next. With a finger raised to the sky, and a careful eye on where his golems were marking Mercy's position, he flicked his index finger down, and uttered a single word. "Meteor." Inside his spirit, an A-Tier Vancian spell was unmoored from his tight mental grip, and the spell resolved itself, tugging at something so high above the blasted wasteland that it couldn't be seen. While calling down an actual meteor was beyond his power, a false one was well within his means. A small enough golem, given a strong enough enchantment, could be lifted up into the air, and with a portal, a trickle of spellcraft could be sent through it to grow crystals around it. Given a month, the resulting mass would hang in the sky outside of Equestria's bizarre gravity well, as frozen and unmoving as any other celestial body not piloted by an incredible active force, though still immeasurably tiny and invisible from the ground. Likewise, while moving any celestial object, however artificial, was far beyond what he could do using telekinesis, or even prestidigitation, there did exist a rare few Dark Magic spells designed to wrench control over a celestial body. Ones that were of course, forbidden, until Weiss talked Luna into giving him access to one such spell. But none of that was important. What was important right now, was the white bolt that shot down exactly a minute after Weiss spoke, the one that smashed open a gaping molten wound in the mottled brown hive, and gave him access to it. He grinned as he saw Mercy staring out where light was shining into the room she was in suddenly, the strike had been lose enough to nearly hit her. "It's odd," Weiss thought aloud as he stepped up onto a golem, and passed into the antimagic field of the hive. None of his spells could be cast here, so close to the magical throne that sat at the center of the Changeling Hive. The throne did not prevent ongoing magic, nor did it prevent certain internal spellworks from functioning. If it did, anything that entered would grow sickly ill as their own internal magic began to fail. Only as he threw open the resin door and faced the snake did he finish the thought. "Where are all the changelings?" She opened her mouth and began to speak, but as she did, something fuzzy seemed to overcome him, and he shook his head to banish it. "Nevermind. You're the one I'm here for," Weiss says, stepping towards her. He saw her looking around the room, saying more words, but as he looked to where she was staring and shouting, he heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary. As he continued to approach, Mercy finally snapped, lunging at him with her fangs outstretched. In a single motion, Weiss stepped to the side, and his claws lanced out like knives, grabbing her by both her upper and lower jaw, as well as the snake's neck and head. The fangs failed to pierce the black hide of the limbs, and the teeth around them fared little better. Weiss felt somewhat ill, like he was being driven to leave the place, but in a moment of clarity, he felt a lance of black fire erupt from his body, striking a seemingly random spot, and the feeling faded slightly. He wasn't sure why, but as he held the writhing creature that served as Sombra's right-hoof snake, he began to speak. "I'm going to pretend I don't know where this place is. I'm going to pretend I never found it, in fact. I'm going to leave, now that I have what I came for," he muses aloud. "There's only one reason I would have, to come to this pitiful, wretched place. Only one." "And it's if I had unfinished business," He finishes with one last burst of hate, turning and walking away with his golems in tow. As he leaves the hive, he feels the potent magic begin to fade. Magic only potent enough to drive him out, and keep him away once he had no business left there. In the end, the changelings were mere pawns, pawns that he had utterly abolished from his realm already, in the most painful and final way he had at his disposal. In some unconscious part of himself he hadn't suppressed, he still could remember vague impressions of what this feeling, what "mercy" meant, what "forgiveness" felt like. He was quickly forgetting such things as his lust for revenge and penance grew with each passing day and each fleeting nightmare, but he hadn't quite forgotten what they were. Yet. Mercy writhed in the chains clamped around her entire body as she was hung suspended over the middle of the room in a spiderweb of black metal. The two Diarchs were in the room as well as several other audience members, sitting in a variety of luxuriant seats. "Greetings, Mercy. According to Sombra's journals, you were perhaps his most loyal servant in his crusade to dominate the Crystal Empire, and later, the Shadow Realm. You are charged with illegal and unethical experimentation, torture, and crimes more horrid than even those," Weiss says calmly, resting a cheek on his fist as he sat on a large, simplistic throne, the metal seat surrounded by a large wooden desk. "And, much to my relief, you have chosen to appeal to this court, instead of accepting your execution for it. What would you say, then, before I offer you your sole alternative? Your 'Shadow Game'?" Mercy stares at the ruler with unabashed disgust. "You are nothing more than a husk, a facsimile of what could have been. My research with King Sombra's backing uncovered secrets of biology that would boggle your puny little mind. The only reason I'm here is to make that perfectly clear to you. You're nothing more than an allegory taken to its logical conclusion, a dullard. Nothing you do or say will cow me." Weiss smiles. "Very well. One final question, before I grant you... mercy. Were your actions born of selfishness and greed? Two things which I respect dearly? Or did you serve Sombra because you believed in the righteousness of his goal? Because you wished harm to the Shadow Realm, and the ponies in it?" he asks curiously. The snake simply hisses at him. He nods in response. "I see." With that, Weiss rises up from his throne, and those watching observe nervously as he breaks protocol to approach the prisoner. "Whether or not you care to admit it, you came to this court because you did not wish for death. So, I will sentence you to life, until the day Tartarus claims you," he says, holding up three fingers as his expression grows gleeful, like a child about to tell a joke they had been planning for oh so long. "The three curses of life, in fact." He ignites his horn, and before long, a vial filled with black liquid is created from nothing, and, uncorking it, he allows the liquid to turn into a thick smoke that wafts around Mercy, who is cursing and thrashing in her bindings. "May you be recognized by those in high places," Weiss says with a crack of thunder. The smoke is forcing its way down the snake's nostrils and mouth. "May you live in interesting times," he says with another rattling bloom of electricity and sound that flows through the black substance and echoes through the courtroom. He pauses, and a grim facade falls over the sage as his smile reaches its widest point. The room is growing darker, as the lights begin to dim. "And finally..." With a final roar of thunder, the smoke has entered Mercy's body completely, and she hangs limply in the chains. "May all of your wishes come true." At first, it seems like nothing happened, or worse, that the snake had simply been killed in a rather frightening way, but those thoughts are abolished from the audience's mind as her eyes suddenly open, revealing the total blackness that fills them. With a movement, Mercy breaks free of her chains, the augmentations in her body finally giving her enough power to snap them. "You're a fool, little replicant, and now you'll die like one!" she roars, leaping up and biting Weiss Noir in the neck. Immediately, he jerks back with a scream, clutching his neck even as it begins hissing and spurting with her own personal blend of neurotoxin and acids. She glances to where the two alicorns are sitting, both of them suddenly leap up and gallop towards her. "Get away-!" she begins, prepared to follow it with a threat to Weiss's life, but before she can insist that only she has the cure, the two alicorns disappear like soap bubbles popping in the wind with expressions of shock. "W-what?" the snake muses, shaking her head. With a glance at the fearful crowd of those who agreed to bear witness to her sham of a "trial", she whips past the two guards and escapes into the tunnels, prepared to escape, and get revenge on the Changeling Queen who refused to protect her from the dead imbecile she left steaming on the ground. Luna and Celestia step back from the prisoner in shock as she begins to cackle in her chains. "I can't believe it was that easy! The fool fell so easily, he wasn't expecting it at all!" the snake gibbers in their bindings as two guards begin to unlatch her from the shackles and cart her away, her black eyes seeing something that nobody else did. Weiss watches with a satisfied grin. "So... Wanna watch?" he asks, pulling out a little pad covered with buttons and dials, shaking it merrily. On the screen, they could see a snake making its way to the badlands at speeds that seemed impossible. With the push of a button, however, the events on the screen became... Interesting.