Needles of pale, transparent crystal floated in the air, born aloft like feathers on silk strands, each one delicate, finer than the thinnest sewing needle, like wire in their slim simplicity.
"You see, when you do this long enough, you learn how to make someone afraid, even when they're completely safe. Even if you explain in no uncertain terms that you're forbidden from hurting or killing them. Even when they overhear that the situation they're in is as harmless as can be, since your hands, or hooves, are tied," I said, sipping at my coffee as I rubbed at my tired eyes. I was exhausted, and, without any tools or materials left over that could do the job of manipulating my dreams and storing my magic, I hadn't been able to refresh my Vancian Magic for the day.
I could tell that Eclipse Flash wasn't happy, she blinked blearily at Chancellor Bitter Pill, who had been the next on my list for interrogating. She told me not to hurt him, and to state in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't to the pony himself. I held to nothing less than the exact words of that promise.
"Tell me, Chancellor, you did hear that, correct? Nod if you hear me say that I'm forbidden from harming you," I requested, and slowly, the pony nodded his head up, then down. The needles hovering in the air followed him, and the harmless pinprick of the splinters, I'm certain kept him from doing anything rash.
"Are you afraid and willing to tell me everything you know about Chapter Black, Chancellor, despite knowing that I'm forbidden from causing you any harm or pain? Your behavior seems to imply that you don't feel safe," I asked, eyebrows quirking.
"I-I am very frightened, yes."
I pressed the stallion, looking him in the eye curiously. "Despite knowing that I have no intention of hurting you? My student is right here, I can't do a thing."
"Y-yes."
I gestured. "See?"
Eclipse rubbed at her face. "Could you remove the crystals, Weiss?"
I smirked. "Sure, watch this," I snapped my fingers, and the crystals disappeared. The prissy pony's fear, however, did not.
"Do you feel safer? I removed the needles," I asked, in a smooth, oily tone that made the chancellor quite literally shiver.
"Not particularly."
"Great. Now, on to the list of every single site holding Chapter Black assets, illegal dark magic, tomes, dirty money, whatever you've got," I waved casually, sliding a pad of paper and a pen over to the pony.
Suddenly, a chill ran down my own spine, and a little fuzzy flapping eyeroc appeared, seemingly unfolding from empty air, and proceeding to chitter frantically in a sort of non-language that nonetheless conveyed one of my greatest fears.
"Weiss?" Eclipse asked, and I groaned, something clenching invisibly at my stomach. Tension. Nerves. Annoyance.
"Someone stole another Weapon of Light. The one that should have been the most well protected..."
Rather than the hot fury I expected, I just felt anguished. Why? Why do my precious weapons have to be treated like this? They were meant to be beautiful, good. The one thing I had going for me, and this is what they do to it? How they choose to attack me, right at my heart like this?
Eclipse laid a hoof on my shoulder, sensing something in my expression. "We'll figure this out, Weiss."
I took a deep breath, trying to stuff down the hurt and fear back where it belonged.
I turned to the chancellor, who seemed confused, looking up from his writing at the two of us.
I rolled my eyes impatiently, and waved a hand at him. "Look, I have to go do a thing. Pretend I'm still here, saying weird shit and making you scared as all hell, okay? Finish your homework and I promise you'll go to jail," I said to the stallion, whirring around and leaving the room with my student. As I left, I turned my negative feelings outwards, and felt new fresh hatred blooming.
"I am about to redefine every fucking synonym for the word 'pain', and when I find the idiot who stole my precious Weapon of Light..."
My voice trailed off as I grabbed the doors and slammed them shut behind me. The loud echo of clanging metal punctuated the end of my assurance.
"They'll be the defenition,"
Lacking any other immediate leads, I brought Eclipse down to the bottom of my tower in the Everfree. To the lowest floor, where I kept it.
"Well, here's where it was. Look around, see if you can spot anything that seems off," I say, walking up to the machine. Rather than doing as I asked, however, my student follows me. 'She seems...'
"Weiss, what is this machine?" she asked, swallowing heavily.
I frowned, shaking my head. "It's the Devil's Machine. Not relevant to the situation at hand, we should focus on finding the rod, Eclipse."
She didn't listen, walking up to the computer managing it, and just staring at the readouts that it displayed while idling.
"Brainwaves... Magical frequencies. This machine, it's meant to influence emotions, isn't it?" she said quietly, and I could tell something was wrong.
"Yes. I built it to give me the power I needed. This machine is capable of manifesting your emotional conflicts in a dreamscape, and, with the Star Rod of Dreams embedded in that slot over there, it can make this effect permanent. Absolutely nothing kills a pony's magical power quite like being conflicted. With the Devil's Machine, I could permanently suppress that conflict. Defeat my weaker self, and become what I was meant to be," I explained.
I approached her, and placed a hand on the machine, the hoses trailing off of the gruesome-looking pod glowed with a matte light under the dim bulbs illuminating the room.
"Imagine the kind of power a pony wields, when their intentions are utterly pure. When there is no doubt whatsoever in their mind. I've tasted that power before, and this machine was going to bring that power out."
With a sigh, I looked away. "It didn't work, needless to say. I thought it did, but it failed to truly suppress my lighter emotions.
I scoffed. "Bah, what a waste of time. Now I don't even need that power. It's just a curio now, taking up space and collecting dust. Let's go, Eclipse, there's nothing here to help find that rod. We're going to have to figure something else out."
Eclipse twisted, and I could see her shivering, with rage or some other emotion, I couldn't quite tell. "What could you have possibly needed power for so badly, that you would destroy your own heart to do it, Weiss?! This machine... It would have killed you, turned you into a husk of your former self!"
"I needed it to defeat Sombra," I explained, but she shook her head.
"No you didn't. You had Celestia and Luna both, and those Elements of Harmony, those could have done the job, or the Weapons of Light you made, they could have laid that tyrant low just as easily! He had none of his protections, none of his former power!"
I swallowed, taking a step back at the vitriol. "I needed it to defeat him myself,"
"No! No you didn't! I've seen your power Weiss, and Priss? She's found newspapers, ones of you fighting Celestia, twice even! You had the power of hundreds of years of dark magic already! You couldn't have needed more power to defeat him."
I froze. My student, her face so hurt, so worried.
Finally, I answered. "Everything I did, I did to avenge you. Everything I've done, I've done to punish those responsible. All I had to live for was revenge, so that's all I lived for."
"And after that?" she asked, eyes brimming with tears. "After all of that revenge? Then what?"
I looked down. I remembered, in the way I didn't like doing. I answered, in exactly the way I didn't answer Tempest Shadow, when she asked me the same question.
"An end."
I continued to explain, my lips continued to move, but there was no true sound for the two of us. Nothing to be heard.
The words after were meaningless. The intent had been conveyed from the start.
I already spoke the truth. There was nothing after my revenge. No continuation, nothing stretched beyond that moment on the thread of my destiny, in my eyes.
Only an ending.
My student was crying. The quiet murmur of machinery only slowly returned to the background behind us, a sound by which to compare the quiet drip of tears to as they fell to the floor.
I stood silently as Eclipse Flash's breathing grew frantic, and her muscles tightened.
I stepped aside as she walked past me, towards the machine.
I waited patiently as she let out a scream, driving her hooves into the Devil's machine, and beginning the laborious process of annihilating it, exterminating it from this world and erasing it to its last atom.
Should I have advised her? Hatefire alone would have been sufficient. Attacking it with her bare hooves only served to break up the machinery, tearing the rubberized hosing and the steel plating. Her goal was clearly to destroy it far more thoroughly.
For once, I knew that would be the wrong thing to say. I knew hate. I knew that she didn't merely want to burn the machine until nothing remained. She wanted to do it with her own two hooves, piece by shrieking piece.
'How sad is that?' I thought blithely. 'For once, I actually understand my student's feelings.'
After all, isn't that what I wanted to do? To destroy Sombra's hope with such fury and malice that it couldn't be mistaken for anything but blind hatred? That it was done for no purpose beyond the purity of its emotion?
She was breathing heavily as my tower burned around us with the black fire of hatred.
I told Luna. I warned Celestia. Here and now, I saw it in her tears. The truth that I am too far gone. Too far gone to understand the emotions that living things felt.
Why was she sad? Why was she angry? Didn't she understand? She said the machine would have destroyed my heart, if I had used it.
How did she not see, that my heart had already been destroyed, so long ago?
I saw, agnostic of myself, my body, moving on its own. I stood next to her, as the tower shuddered, her hatred too powerful to be contained, even as it dimmed and faded into sorrow.
My body hugged hers, and she hugged it in turn.
I felt... Cold. My ashy body seemed so frail, in her hooves.
She began to say something. About helping me. About fixing whatever had happened inside my mind.
But as she spoke, I was far away. Lost in thought. Since the return of the Shadow Realm, I had been adrift. Without purpose. Without revenge. Without something to hate.
"I will never give up, Weiss," Eclipse promised, with a voice as firm and hard as the foundations of the earth. "I will help you. This- You don't need this. This doesn't have to be your destiny. This- This finality...
"I'll take you past it. I promise," she whispers to me.
Her words feel so... Limiting. Shackling of herself.
Dark Magic is something she has devoted herself to, but this talk of- of making things better...
Dark Magic cannot make someone better. She should know that.
She should have learned that by now.
It burned inside of me, for a reason I didn't quite understand. Why hadn't she learned that? Why didn't she know already?
And yet, the knowledge seemed to draw me out of the cold. A glint of determination, if that's what it was, had appeared in me.
I told Celestia that I would wipe away Chapter Black, and Cadence- I told her I would complete Eclipse Flash's education.
I promised myself to complete the Weapons of Light, so that the Elements of Harmony could be as powerful as they needed to be, to destroy whatever emerged from the dark.
I still had a chance. I could still do good. Despite the suspicion that had been growing inside me, the suspicion of just how corrupt I had become...
There was still a fragment of hope, that I could be a good person.
This story could still have a happy ending.
Lightning struck us, and we disappeared from the tower.
"Erm, ladies," Flim greeted, having called them out behind the barn.
"What's up? You needed to see us?" Gilda asked, looking around suspiciously. The gigantic machine sitting idly by looked... Angry. Its immobile form somehow conveying a certain tension, even in its sculpted, blank pony face.
This was further compounded by the frantic energy of Flam, who was buried in the machine's innards, scrambling to figure something out deeper inside.
"Indeed. I believe something has set off the Great Sacred Treasure. Some kind of... Malice," Flim explained nervously.
"I talked to Sunset, and she suggested you all come here so we could figure this out," he concluded. Sunset approached the group.
"Before you ask, no, it's not Weiss Noir. It's detecting... Something else. I don't know how to explain it, but somehow, all the sensors jammed into it are... Overlapping. Synergizing together to detect something weird."
"Could you be a bit clearer? Trixie is not the best at comprehending vague portents of doom," Trixie asked, trying to ignore the Star Rod of Dreams as it hovered near her, bobbing silently with imaginary words that only she could hear.
Gilda shook her head. "No, I know what she means. The sword's been feeling a bit weird too. Like there's something dangerous going on."
Garble scratched his head. "Okay..? Well if I can't punch it or burn it, I don't know why the heck you guys wanted me here."
Sunset gave the dragon a mild glare. "We might, is the thing. I called you all here so we could figure out what exactly 'it' is."
"There we are!" Flam exclaimed, pulling his body free of the machine, just as a hologram appeared from the gigantic golem-armor's head, its glaring eyes projecting a map of Equestria.
One marked in a particular place with an ominous pillar of darkness.
Sunset nodded to the map, looking at her friends and acquaintances. "As you can see, that is not a marker you want to see overlayed on top of Tartarus itself."
Gilda smirked, as did Shooting Star, cracking their necks as their beaks curled up in unison.
"Sounds like fun. So we go check it out? If Gilda's freaky sword is getting uppity, it's gotta be in need of some buttkicking." Shooting Star remarked. Her own chest hummed, as her Star Rod of Wishes seemed to pulse in agreement.
Sunset hummed. "The fact that the Weapons of Light themselves seem to be drawn to it does imply that it isn't a... Friendship-compatible problem, exactly. Garble, take a letter," she asks.
"No," he answers.
The unicorn looks to the stars above with a silent plea for patience. "Fine, I'll go get my book, then," she says, trotting off to pen a warning to Celestia. As soon as she finished, it was time to go.
The Warriors of Light would face their first true trial...
...At the Gates of Tartarus.