In her apartment in the castle, Sunset looked up from her scroll, noting the time. She put away her studies, turned out her light, and trotted over to her bookshelf where her orders lay.
Her first assignment, the proof of all her work and study, was open on the top of the bookshelf. She read it again, mentally preparing herself for her upcoming operation. It was a simple assignment. She was to travel by chariot to her insertion point, then by hoof to her theater of operations. There she was to deliver a message to the dragons of the Grevenweld Clutch, one way or another.
Celestia had trained her for this, including combat conditioning and survival training. She had also been trained in the mental discipline known affectionately as killology, learning to distance herself from the objects of her operations as the need arose.
She was ready. She would not let her mentor down.
The sit-rep was direct and straight to the point. The Grevenweld Clutch had begun staging raids against their neighboring pony villages, stealing foals and livestock under the cover of night. A diplomatic envoy had been sent along with a contingent of Royal Guard to demand the return of the foals. They too disappeared, down to the last mare. A reply was sent by the clutch, however. The next morning, the robes and picked-clean skull of the envoy was found outside a nearby village. The message was clear. We don’t parlay with our food, we eat them.
So the mage corps was called. As the princesses personal special operations team, they were tasked with delivering more direct messages from the princess, when her diplomatic attempts were rebuffed. Her diplomats were the olive branch of Friendship. Her mage corps were Friendship, Weaponized.
It may have seemed contradictory, at first, how what she was about to do to this entire clutch could be viewed as “Friendship”, but it was really a form of terrible mercy. By sending the message she was tasked to deliver tonight, Celestia, and by extension all of Equestria, were actually behaving as true friends to the Dragon Nations, keeping them from the folly of viewing the prey species they lived near as weak, As helpless, As Food. If allowed to continue, it could lead to an all out war with the Dragons, and with the power of the Equestrian forces, the decimation of the Dragon population.
So to avoid that, and to keep relations friendly, sometimes a terrible message had to be sent, as a firm but necessary reminder to a proud species that a sentient prey species does not mean food. And sometimes, that message was spelled out in fire, blood, and death.
Throwing on the white and gold hooded shawl of the mage corps, Sunset strapped on her saddlebag, sliding her orders into it, and trotted out of her room in the castle tower, down the stairs and out to the parade ground in the central keep. There waiting for her was her ride, a single chariot with two pegasus guards ready to roll. She stepped up to the lead mare.
“Mage Sunset Shimmer, reporting as ordered,” she announced.
“Major Tailwind, Canterlot Royal Guard. We’re your insertion team for the night. Have you reviewed your orders, and understood the operations?” queried the lead mare.
“Yes ma'am,” replied Sunset. “Tactical insertion at three stadia outside the clutch. I deliver the princess's ‘message’ then return for immediate extraction.”
“Copy that, Mage. We’re good to go then. Good hunting,” the Major replied. Sunset trotted into the chariot securing her hooves in the straps provided and the team took off into the night. They kept low and headed straight for the clutch on the outskirts of Equestria. From her studies, Sunset knew it would be a moderately long fight, so she closed her eyes and meditated, trying to keep her focus and peace before the operation.
As they neared the insertion point she opened her eyes, taking in the landscape around them. They had just dropped under the cloud cover, losing altitude quickly to minimize the risk of being spied on their approach. She confirmed the location and heading to the clutch as they descended. It was a moderately small clutch. Several stone buildings were in the central region. A large stonework wall surrounded the clutch with cages and stone sheds around the inside of the wall for storage. By the looks of it, perhaps 100 to 150 dragons lived inside.
This was a touch and go insertion, which meant that her team would only be grounded for a few seconds as she leapt off the back of the chariot. They would then return to the cover of the clouds above. She released her hooves from the straps, preparing to jump off as they touched down. There was a slight bump. She leapt through the darkness, landing neatly in the field beneath her at a brisk troot to bleed off the momentum from her jump. She watched as the team lifted back off silently and flew up into the cloud cover unseen. There was no sign or sound of alarm - a good insertion, by the numbers and by the book.
Sunset trotted briskly towards the clutch wall. Her eyes, ears and senses were keyed and alert for any sign of trouble or detection. As she neared the wall she reflected on the mage corps motto. One mess, one mage. It was their way of keeping their responses proportional. Any more than one mage and it wasn’t a response, it was a war.
At the wall, she stopped, and took a breath. This was it. No turning back. If she ever wanted to be a princess herself, she needed to be able to act like one. To do that included acts like these, what she was sent here to do.
She shook herself briefly, a shiver passing through her. No! No second thoughts. She was committed. She was the princesses' iron fist. She’d given her vow. She was doing this.
She pulled the hood up over her head, and charged at the wall…
And teleported directly through it coming out on the other side just past the sheds she had seen on her approach. Still at full charge, she bellowed out in her loudest Canterlot Voice.
“Dragons of Grevenweld Clutch! You have been found guilty of acts of aggression against the ponies of Equestria! Prepare to face Equestria’s wrath!”
Reaching the building in the center of the clutch, she lowered her head and released a seismic shockwave at the building, which rattled it causing the walls to crumble and its towers to fall. Dragons ran screaming from the building only to be pierced through by laser focused beams of pure magical destruction from her horn, dropping them as they appeared. The night was filled with cries, screaming and shouting as she charged around the structure, slaying anything that appeared before her.
Eventually, no more heads or faces presented themselves to her as targets, though she could still hear crying and screaming from within the ruins of the destroyed keep. She stopped before the still intact gate, ripping it telekinetically from its moorings and entering the decimated stronghold. Smoke and fire obscured her vision, so she summoned a storm wind to race through ahead of her, blowing out the smoke, fanning the flames, and scattering the shattered furnishings against the still standing keep walls. Several smaller dragons were uncovered in the brief storm, all of whom she dispatched quickly.
As she worked her way through the keep, storming and slaying from room to room, she kept her eye out for a dragon to serve as her designated survivor. Mage corps doctrine directed that, if possible without compromising the safety and efficacy of the mission, she was to select a moderately healthy and sufficiently mature survivor from among her targets to spare as a witness to her acts. They had to be old enough to understand what they were seeing, but not so mature as to be a risk to either the mage or the operation. She dismissed all the vermin she had seen so far as being too capable of fighting back for the role, putting them to immediate death by her hoof or horn instead.
She came to what was clearly the clutches nursery. A young mother hid under a table, holding her terrified newt close to her. Sunset turned to her, preparing to dispatch her and her newt.
“Why are you doing this!?” the terrified mother screamed. “Why?”
Sunset paused. “You chose this yourselves. By your actions, by your choices, you have sentenced yourself and your clan to death. You have no one to blame but yourself,” she answered, lancing her through the skull with a powerful beam of magic. The child in her arms screamed out in terror, shocking Sunset from the trance she was trying to maintain. Looking at the child screaming in terror and its nearly headless mother, she nearly vomited in revulsion.
“No!” she reminded herself. “No! These are not creatures! These are vermin! And I have been sent here to exterminate vermin!” Shaking her head, she shot the screaming newt through the heart, ending her cries, then went from crib to crib, incinerating the eggs and newts within each of them. When she had completely decimated the room and its occupants, she resumed her march through the keep, destroying everything in her path.
In one of the last rooms left to check, she came across a group of older newts hiding under a bed, screaming and crying. She yanked the nearest one from under the bed holding it suspended beside her in her telekenitic grasp while she destroyed the others, lancing them through their hearts and setting their bodies and the entire room afire, the newt beside her crying and screaming in abject terror.
Completing her sweep of the keep, she backtracked through the carnage, keeping the terrified newt aloft to see the death and destruction she had wrought. When she came again to the gate, she exited, sending one last telekinetic seismic shockwave through the keep, collapsing it in on itself, the ruble burying the flaming dead inside.
Newt still at her side, sensate but overwrought to the point of speechlessness, she blasted in the doors to each of the dwellings surrounding the keep, destroying anything or anyone within. Once all the dwellings had been destroyed, Sunset moved on to the cages and sheds surrounding the clutch outer wall.
She had been hoping against hope to find some of the missing foals alive in the cages or sheds, but that was not to be. The cages only contained livestock, which she released, and the sheds only prepared meats, much of that the cured flesh of ponies. She incinerated the found flesh, leaving nothing but ash as required by her mandate, and left not one stone upon another of every shed containing pony flesh. Having completed the entire round of the structure, with not one shed or cage left standing, she blasted out a section of the wall, opening a large pathway to the surrounding fields. The livestock immediately fled through the opening in a squawking, squealing exodus of feathers and fur, while Sunset and her now silent witness followed at their rear.
Leaving the structure, Sunset turned to face the wall. She leveled a final spell against it, rending the entire structure all around, leaving not one stone upon another. Satisfied with her work, she turned and trotted into a nearby field, her insensate involuntary witness still in tow.
Reaching the center of the field, Sunset lowered the newt to the ground, where she promptly collapsed, looking up at her in shock.
“You!” Sunset called out to her. “You have been spared for one reason, to deliver this message. Go, and tell everyone you find what you have seen here. Tell them this is what happens to those who spurn Equestria’s offered hoof of friendship!”
Sunset turned and trotted away from the trembling newt who, still shaking, rose and ran screaming and crying off into the darkness.
Sunset trotted back out to the extraction point, sending up a magical flare into the night.
Her extraction team descended from the clouds, rolling to a stop before her. “Mage Sunset Shimmer reporting message delivered, ma’am,” she reported to the Major as she passed, entering the chariot and securing her hooves once again in the straps for the return trip.
Satisfied, the Major nodded. “Message received, Mage. Heading home,” she replied as they launched back into the air and headed back to Canterlot castle.
In her mind, Sunset could not stop seeing the blood and carnage, still hearing the screams of the newts and dragons as she took their lives. She closed her eyes, trying desperately to think of anything else, but nothing could displace the visions before her.
When they reached Canterlot castle, they landed in the parade ground before the tower. Sunset slowly stepped out of the chariot, nodded her thanks to her team, then returned to her tower apartment. She entered the bathroom where she stripped off her robe and crawled into the shower, trying to wash the blood, smoke and death from herself as she emptied her stomach repeatedly over the drain. As she scrubbed, visions of death and carnage were still present with crystal clarity before her.
Drying off finally, she crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. Shaking, she fell fitfully asleep, still seeing the young mothers face in her mind as she restlessly dreamt through the night, always calling out one word to her.
“Why?”