After Bernard left, and Lethe and Gaston wandered away to do their own things, I didn't have to wait long before the hold became eventful again.
That event was the appearance of Pirate King Rhodallis.
For a moment, he stared at me, walking up to my cage and trailed by several pirates, including Bernard. I couldn't quite tell if he was evaluating me or daring me to ask why he was there, but right before I gave in, he nodded, and then spoke.
"You're up for crew duty," he growled absently, voice gruff and arrogant as usual. "Follow me."
"Crew duty?" I blinked. "You mean following you off the ship to..."
"Yes." Rhodallis was already walking away. "Think of it as an opportunity to show what you're made of."
I swallowed. According to Bernard, this next excursion was another attempt to sell Coda. Which was good for me if I wanted to stay as close to her as possible, but could quickly spiral out of control... Actually, that was assuming I had any control in the first place. Which I didn't.
Nobody bothered to unlock the cage, so all I could do was shadow sneak through the bars to follow him. Everyone looked at me like they were perfectly aware I could have done that any time I wanted, and all of us knew Rhodallis' word was the thing that actually kept me within those bars. Making me leave like this was clearly a show of that power, one I didn't feel like dwelling on: this would be different than the previous times anyone tried to conscript me.
Not that it was any different yet.
The room Rhodallis led me to was clearly an armory, bedecked with all manner of weapons and armor. Sickles, daggers and greatswords, light padding and scale male and even a full set of plate, chakrams and halberds and whips and clubs mingled with other weapons I had never even seen before.
"Take what you can use," the Pirate King instructed, leaning against the entry. "I doubt you're completely unarmed, but the usual sarosian tools of the trade don't work so well where we're going."
I swallowed. Actually, I was completely unarmed, my bracelet still carried by Seigetsu countless miles away. And my combat training was pretty narrow in scope...
"Why?" I asked, trying to buy more time to think. "Aren't we going to barter? You're expecting this to come to blows? And you think I'll have something to contribute next to your crew?"
Rhodallis chuckled. "Don't be so modest. You had the confidence to be slinking around in that castle where I picked you up. Now take what you can use."
I surveyed the armory again. Physical strength was about my greatest asset - along with being possibly immortal and able to recover from heinous injuries, which these pirates really didn't need to know about. Plus, I liked being covered up, so starting with armor seemed like a decent enough plan.
The full plate was too big for me, unfortunately, but I managed to find a set sized for a normal mare that was only modestly bulky, form-fitting with a patchwork of plates and reinforced leather. It didn't come with sabatons or a helmet, but after adjusting it as best as I could, I felt like I could wear a coat over top of it and only look slightly large rather than conspicuous. The armory did have a few capes, but with this, I felt like I could pass on those.
I did a few quick movement exercises to familiarize myself with how much the armor hindered me - Rhodallis said nothing, which I assumed signaled approval that I was taking this seriously.
Weapons were harder. In Icereach, while training with the yaks, I had never found something I felt comfortable with. I put in a decent amount of time with a quarterstaff, but it was difficult to appraise my own results when a humble stick had never been able to make a yak so much as wince.
The armory did cough up a staff, though, and it was a good sight better than the ones I had trained with in Icereach. This one was split up into three segments, the joints held together with short, spring-loaded chains that pulled the top and bottom into their slots. And the ends were tipped with sturdy metal, so with a little practice, it could effectively convert between a staff and a large pair of nunchucks with a well-practiced flick. And when folded up, it was portable, too.
I didn't feel I had the time to give it more than a few practice swings, just to familiarize myself with the locking mechanism, but this seemed like a no-brainer. Into one of the clips on my armor it went.
The other thing that gave me pause were the greatswords. When I was little, I had always liked those; my fascination dated to the same phase that gave me the overdone-cool aesthetic I applied to my old coats. Reality ruined my dreams when I actually tried to use them; it simply wasn't possible for younger me to lift and effectively wield something that hefty and big. But now...
I hesitated, staring at the swords. I didn't have my bracelet or the extra strength it could provide, sure, but I had grown since then. And strength was usually what I considered my biggest asset. Not that these were for the average strong ponies, but was it worth a try?
Reaching up, I pulled down one with a long, serrated edge like an unfolded batpony wing, then thought better of it and traded that for a straight, single-edged blade that didn't taper until the very end and had a remarkably wide profile. I tried several stances, from holding it purely in a mouth grip to bracing the handle under my wing joint and standing three-legged, and the heavy armor I had donned first weighed me down that I didn't tip over even with the sword fully extended.
Was that what I had been missing before? Was it never about my overall strength, but my center of gravity? I swung the sword a few more times, several wide, aesthetic holes bored through the metal along the blade's length starting at the hilt, which had the effect of making it densest at the tip. And I kept my footing.
"This is good." I nodded, realizing the holes also made it easier to affix to the small hooks on the back of my armor. "I'm ready."
Rhodallis raised an eyebrow, looking intrigued. "Wouldn't have pegged you for that type. Well, we'll see soon enough if you can use it. Keep up."
As I followed Rhodallis back to the ship's entrance, our momentum shifted, the ship slowing and losing altitude beneath my hooves. Some other pirates were there, and so was Coda in her block of ice, strapped to a trolley cart that was outfitted to be pulled by a single pony. If I got the opportunity to make a break for it with her, that would be good for me... but as I stared at her and ran my mind over the possibilities, a strange, queasy sensation started to settle over me.
I was too familiar with the effects of panic attacks and working my mind into a paranoid spiral to mistake this for one. Something was different. Something was wrong.
A quick glance at the rest of the crew told me many of them sensed nothing amiss... except for Rhodallis. He wore a hard expression that mostly matched his usual one, except seemed to be masking the fact that something was bugging him. And he seemed keenly interested in me.
So, I tried not to betray how I was feeling, too.
Hallie? Faye asked in my mind.
Mentally, I tuned in. Did she know anything about what this was?
Maybe, she said. I think... we might be picking up on some sort of strong emotional presence, though it's hard to tell when I'm in the back. We've been breaking down the walls between us, but you were originally designed to seal away our identity as a changeling queen, so we'd probably feel it a lot more strongly if I was up front.
Would that be a good thing? Should we switch?
I got the impression of her shaking her head. Certainly not while everyone's staring at us. I might be able to tell more about what this is if I was up front, but I'm not sure that would be a good thing. I can't make out what this is feeling, but it feels bad.
Yeah. That was the impression I was getting, too.
Before we could talk further, Bernard walked over and patted me on the back. With a wink and without a word, he took up a position beside Rhodallis, in front of the sealed exit door.
"Sir, we'll be doing a flyby to drop you in less than a minute," a mare said, poking her head down the staircase to the bridge. "Everything in order on your end?"
Rhodallis gave her a serious nod. "Roger. prepare to open the door."
A flyby? To drop us? Where were we going?
That noxious feeling increased, but felt somehow distant, as if some other force was holding it just at bay in ways I couldn't describe. I glanced between Rhodallis, Bernard, and Coda - the Pirate King himself had loaded the trolley on his back, standing firm under its weight. I felt like a mission with this degree of initial tension deserved some sort of explanation before-
"...Open the door now," Rhodallis commanded, counting under his breath. "You two, prepare to jump!"
Someone pulled a safety lever, and the door snapped open with a ferocious clang of metal. It was clearly designed to open quickly, if not peacefully... Before I could finish that thought, or even process what was on the other side, Rhodallis barked the order to jump, and leapt from the still-moving airship, Bernard only a step behind him.
I knew better than to question tight timing in a situation like this. Seeing that Bernard had no wings either and trusting they wouldn't be required, I pushed down that growing sense of wrongness and flung myself from the door.
I hit the ground - metal ground - hard, and had to tuck into a roll to preserve my leg joints. That was a maneuver I wasn't used to doing with a giant sword on my back, and once I was upside-down, it prevented me from finishing the roll, leaving me stuck on my back for just long enough to see the ship accelerate away into the green-tinged sky.
Before my position could start to look awkward, I pushed myself upright and turned in a circle, a chill running down my spine as I took in the panorama of my surroundings.
We were standing atop a thick, metal wall. To one side was a sea of concrete, rails and warehouses and cranes and smokestacks stretching as far as the eye could see, except none of the trains were moving and all the smokestacks were dead. The metal walls had rusted and began to decay, and an eerie green fog wound through the streets, clinging to buildings, wafting and lingering.
To the other side, the wall curved into a massive ring, enclosing a much more ordered yet also more deteriorated set of buildings. Straight sidewalks flanked streets filled with detritus, austere residential or office towers leaned at slight angles, their homogeneous steel walls stained and blackened with soot. At the compound's center was a ziggurat, still standing despite the blown-out buildings that surrounded it. The green fog was here, too, much thicker than outside the walls.
It was inhabited, though. Or, at the very least, there were things moving around down on the streets, glowing points of brighter emerald that were too few and far apart to properly make out.
The fog extended to the wall I was on, as well, which must have been why the sky looked green. And that feeling of wrongness had only grown stronger.
"Tough luck getting pulled for this of all duties, eh?" Bernard said, flipping and catching a dagger, his eyes darting around with a professional wariness.
The look on my face must have told them all they needed to know.
"First time in the Revenant City," Rhodallis guessed, Coda's trolley set up properly once again. "The former capital of Gyre. You've heard the stories."
No, I hadn't, actually, but I nodded hesitantly regardless.
"Our prospective clients live here, which tells you a thing or two about their sanity," Rhodallis said. "A certain wing of the Night's Boon. We've got a... business relationship with them, so whether we make the sale or not, there are a few other goals to accomplish here. Top of the list is replenishing ammo for the ship. We used a lot last time we were in Ironridge, and I want us topped off before the next time we head back."
He patted his own greatsword, then took the trolley harness, waving me forward. "You take point. We're heading for that ziggurat, and can get there however you see fit. Bernard will back you up only when you're losing badly enough to convince us it's not an act. I want to see how you handle yourself in a fight."
I swallowed. "The Night's Boon will want to trade with you even after I fight them?"
Rhodallis gave an unnerving chuckle. "Oh, they're not the only ones here."
And then he fell in behind me.
The queasy feeling deepened as I found a staircase and led them down from the wall, Rhodallis picking up Coda's trolley again to handle the stairs. As we descended into the mist, the sky grew greener, and I began to feel vaguely as if gravity was pulling me in two directions at once. There was something in my vision as well, registering as a sunspot even though it didn't move with my gaze. But it did move with me as I walked, a small colorless blotch that appeared whenever I looked down.
We reached the streets, the mist whispering hallucinatory nothings in my ears that I couldn't make out. Or maybe it was just my nerves. The streets looked broad and straight from above, but down here, they were filled with enough wreckage to obscure my vision of everything but the buildings around me and the ziggurat in the distance. If something wanted to sneak up on me here, it would have no shortage of cover.
So I moved slowly, trying to give corners a careful berth. Defunct mana lights were everywhere, built into the sidewalk curbs and welded to poles, a few of which were still standing. The metal sidewalks had been burned semi-indiscriminately; I couldn't make out a pattern that corresponded to where burnable things might have been before whatever befell this city.
Though, knowing the Empire's recent history, I had a hunch this was related to Chrysalis.
A building had collapsed broadly out into the street ahead, almost completely blocking it off with shattered concrete, twisted rebar and dead mana conduits. In skirting around the rubble, I had to go all the way up onto the sidewalk, passing another scorched structure with the door stuck widely open, its auto-close mechanism dangling in a wreck from the top. Curious, I chanced a look inside.
Something green and on fire rushed me.
Acting on instinct alone, I braced myself with an armored shoulder, my greatsword half-drawn. Two dozen metal splinters clattered against the armor, but a few found softer spots, slipping through with blunted force that was still strong enough to break my skin. My leg burned with pain as I fought to dislodge the attacker, but more than that, something appeared in my mind, a skeletal afterimage of a black and green sun, a fireball in the sky that grasped at my mind with festering tendrils of desiccated flame. The tendrils groped at me, clawed at me, tried to get in, all in a vision that couldn't be real, that felt superimposed in my vision over the reality of me struggling with this sharp, burning thing... but they were repelled every time by a shield of pure, otherworldly gold.
I got my sword between me and the attacker, and with a powerful kick, used its leverage to tear my shoulder free and force myself and the attacker apart. The instant we broke contact, the vision ended and my head cleared, still befuddled by the supernatural pressure of the city but no longer feeling like I was halfway inside a dream.
The thing afforded me barely a second to comprehend it before attacking again, and all I could really see was green fire and scrap metal, but this time I was ready. Instead of bracing myself, I backstepped, warding it with a horizontal slash of my blade, timed to be slightly early in case the weapon was heavier than I expected. The tip grazed it, and forced it back just long enough for me to take another look.
Still fire and scrap metal, and still not a good look, as it charged me yet again, rushing straight forward without any sense of self-preservation. This time, my timing was true, and it screeched with the rending of twisting metal, the sword made from sturdier stuff than it was. But even though the flames burned almost horizontal, like a candle in a breeze, and even though that blow could have mortally wounded a pony, it twisted, its metal rearranging itself as it tried to reform.
I didn't give it the time, closing in with an overhead smash. The thing abandoned rebuilding and simply thrust all of its scrap metal into my chest, but this time it failed to find any chinks, only earning a cacophony of scratching metal on metal as it hit me and my sword smashed into it from above, dropping it to a heap.
The green flame flickered for a moment, and then went out, oozing into a thick green smoke that quickly dissipated, becoming one with the fog swirling around me. Left behind was nothing but ordinary scrap metal.
I poked through it with my staff to be sure, but no surprises jumped out at me. Just industrial wreckage, like so much else laying around on these green-choked streets.
"What was that?" I asked, turning back to my two companions, neither of whom had lifted a hoof to help me.
"A revenant," Rhodallis said, adjusting his own sword as if to check that it was still there. "This place is crawling with them. They spontaneously arise whenever this mist gets too concentrated. Trying to exterminate them is futile, but once one's locked onto you, there's nothing to do but kill it." He let out a deep, bitter breath. "Now pick up the pace! We don't want the stuff that makes them to get any funny ideas about using our own supplies as a vessel."
Halcyon finished off her second revenant with greater ease than the first, though this time she had the element of surprise. Faye, sitting in the back of her head and thinking her own thoughts, got to spend considerably more effort watching them and thinking about them than Halcyon did, even though this time Halcyon took a moment to observe what it really looked like before engaging.
And Faye didn't like what she saw.
The revenant was roughly equinoid in shape, made of scrap metal that seemed to be held together telekinetically, green fire burning everywhere its body should be. It was the same shade of emerald as their own flame, summoned by their bracelet, a fact Halcyon also picked up on. But what Halcyon didn't know was how strongly this place reminded Faye of the crystalline Macrothesis.
Also a city. Also inhabited only by strange, construct approximations of ponies, made from the only materials that happened to be around - crystal in that case, scrap metal in this one. Also existing inside a vortex of emotion, and in both cases, the emotional core was deep down, at the center. But while the emotions of Macrothesis had been steadfast, eternal and pure, these were turbulent and chaotic, and somehow also static and stagnant. It felt less like there was one great mind thinking these thoughts and more like a river of minds, and yet it also felt like a dry riverbed, like she was seeing the channels carved into the land by something that was no longer here. And yet it was so much more present than most emotions that it could literally possess scrap metal to attack you.
That was her working theory on what the green flames were, at least. It was probably some form of changeling queen power, and changeling queens used emotions as power. Except her theory also didn't leave much room for the changeling queen, because these revenants acted less like extensions of something intelligent and more like an autonomous, spontaneous force.
Halcyon backpedaled, accidentally drawing the attention of two revenants at once. Faye could feel her learning, discovering the extent to which she could trust her armor and improving her balance on big swings, and part of her was annoyed with Rhodallis for not joining the fray: seeing a master at work with her same weapon of choice, Halcyon would learn even faster. At the same time, her special talent...
Using it in the way Halcyon had been set up to think it was for was much better than Halcyon realizing what it could actually do. But Halcyon had also been striking out on her own and not using it at all recently, which was even better. Faye wanted to encourage that. Part of her knew she was being pedantic, putting the avoidance of her own fears above the potential good of accessing more power to achieve their formidable goals. But they also had more power than they knew how to handle already, and needed confidence and consistency more than anything else. So, she tried not to resent Rhodallis too hard, and returned to watching, trying to puzzle out one more connection that would make everything she had already observed make sudden sense.
I panted as I smashed the second revenant, noting another patrol of two walking along in the distance. I could be as strong as I liked, but swinging this greatsword around while hiking in a suit of heavy armor, moving from battle to battle without breaks... Without my bracelet's power, I was getting tired.
That said, maybe it was better I didn't have it. My customary deep-seated paranoia, already convinced that the revenant fire was related if not identical to my bracelet fire, suggested all sorts of ways using it in a place like this could backfire on me, from bringing back the hallucinations that happened when they landed a hit to absorbing the green mist and turning me into a revenant.
Having the bracelet be so far away freed me from the temptation of using it. And for all I knew, that was a good thing.
Still, my limits would catch up to me if I went too much longer at this pace, so I turned to Rhodallis and Bernard and laid out my case.
"I think it's pretty apparent I can handle myself at least a little, if you're testing me," I finished. "But I'd like to point out I'm swinging around gear that's way above my weight class. Both of you can probably last a lot longer in these circumstances than I can, and I'd like to not push so hard before you give me backup that I'm dead weight if we have to work together."
"...Alright," Rhodallis said, his customary swagger fully sapped away by now and replaced with an angry, resentful determination. "I suppose I've seen enough. Bernard, back her up from now on. I'll step in when we get to the big ones."
The big ones. Right. Of course those were just small fry. I tried to massage my wounds through the armor, my shoulders, cheeks and legs stinging from the four different times I had been hit so far. Every time was the same result, feeling as if my mind was dragged before that hollowed-out ghost of a star to be groped and probed, and every time being pushed back by the supernatural shield around my mind.
We crossed another patrol, and this one went down easier, Bernard vanishing right as the fight started, then appearing behind one the instant their attention was on me, shredding it with a double-dagger pirouette that belonged to a pony far below his own weight class. It almost made me feel silly, the far smaller pony walking around with heavy armor and weaponry, and him treating the fight like a dance. But it brought results, and I had no reason to complain about that.
"So what are revenants?" I asked, repeating my original question but this time determined to press further. "How do they work? I get that they come from the green fog, but why?"
Rhodallis shrugged. "You ever been to a battlefield? Or maybe a church?"
I nodded. I had spent countless hours in the Icereach chapel.
"The land has a memory," Rhodallis said. "Things happen that are potent enough, or often enough, and the land remembers. And this land just has some particularly bad memories."
"Why?" I asked. "What happened here? Was it related to Chrysalis?"
"This is where her power was assembled," Rhodallis told me, still walking. "All that hatred and apathy and rage and loneliness and despair, mixed into the brew of desolation and poured into her soul... All of that happened beneath this city. So when she embraced that power, this was one of the first places to go."
"She razed it?" I guessed, looking around at the burned-out buildings.
"Didn't even have to." Rhodallis stopped, another revenant patrol approaching around the corner. "There was some sort of feedback, and the place exploded all on its own. Been like this ever since. Don't ask for more details. All I know beyond that is, this city got what it deserved."
I held off on the questions until we defeated the next patrol. This one had three revenants, and I was fairly sure it was where I would have fallen if I was still on my own, or at least would be wounded too badly to go on. But Bernard was a professional, and I only had to take one hit to my armor before he had them all down.
Even though Rhodallis told me not to ask further, I still burned with questions. "So the Night's Boon..."
"Well, they're here because they've got a point to prove," Bernard said, taking over talking from his boss. "They seem to think that with sufficient prayer, rituals, that sort of thing, they can cleanse this place and excise it of its history. Good luck to them, I say."
"So they're here because they're trying to fix it, and remove this green fog?" I asked, keeping a sharp eye out as we walked. "Wouldn't they realize how dangerous it is?"
"Oh, they've got plenty of firepower," Rhodallis said, also looking around. "That's the only reason they're not dead yet. But like I said, firepower doesn't make these things stay gone."
Bernard chuckled. "I doubt a few rituals and good vibes will do much to rejuvenate this place either. You can't break a curse with happy feelings."
Rhodallis shook his head. "Actually, that's the only thing that possibly could. They just don't understand the magnitude of what would have to happen here to counteract what happened before. You can't erase trauma, but in principle, you can add enough other experiences that it's no longer the most definitive event... If they were willing to spend a few thousand years doing it."
I raised an eyebrow. Rhodallis was the last person I ever expected to hear advice on dealing with trauma from, even if it related to the physical land a city was built on.
But Bernard didn't sound convinced. "Even if that could work for other places, how many other spots in the world do you know where a bit of bad history causes those to pop up?" He pointed back at the last scrapped revenants. "This place is different."
I almost expected Rhodallis to argue that it was just a difference of magnitude, but he held his tongue. Huh.
We entered the ziggurat's shadow. The street we had been following drew to a close, reaching a low wall that seemed to be the first barrier separating the inner city from the capitol complex. Rhodallis casually jumped it, carrying Coda's trolley once again, and Bernard easily followed suit. I swallowed, considered whether I'd be able to make it, and settled for shadow swimming up the singed gray bricks.
Now, Bernard took the lead, drawing us into some sort of metal parkland that felt like it was supposed to act as a substitute for green space in a place where trees couldn't grow. In the distance, I spotted a much larger revenant, this one shaped like a scorpion and twice as big as Rhodallis. Bernard gave it a careful berth, and it left us alone.
Above, the sky was a thick emerald, swirling with fog against a backdrop of more fog. Thicker fumes occasionally leaked from grates and drains, and we fought our way through two more patrols, exhaustion starting to creep at my limbs even with Bernard's help. The ziggurat loomed overhead, and already I could see blown-out windows on its upper levels, a flying revenant with broad, immobile wings circling lazily around them.
The fog itself seemed to caress me, probing me and trying to get in, even without a revenant to stab me and inject its flames. What would happen if I accepted it? According to Rhodallis, all this was just a left-behind memory of the power that had once passed through this place, the things and experiences passed on to Chrysalis. Could I even absorb a memory? I understood precious little about how changeling queens worked, but I felt like we dealt in emotions themselves, not the residue they left behind. Or maybe the difference wasn't so clear-cut as that? I could still feel emotions about things that happened to me in my past, even though they weren't happening now, in the present.
Even thinking about opening myself brought the fumes closer, filled my ears with a baleful muttering, not close enough to squirm inside me yet close enough to hear. Voices, crying and complaining and wailing and gnashing their teeth, cursing their oppressors and begging for salvation and ruing their sins and slavering for vengeance, forbidden a future and yet frozen in eternity, formless and lost.
Even listening to their echoes almost distracted me enough to miss Bernard signalling a patrol, and I pulled myself back to reality to deal with it as we approached the ziggurat's gates. But those voices, now that I had heard them, didn't fade from my ears, resuming their endless muttering, begging that each and every individual one might be known.
I thought back to my experience inside Coda's throne, seeing the storm of emotion she had absorbed, a ferocious facade with no substance. That storm couldn't even push back a room full of this fog, let alone a city. Let alone the real thing, the one who embodied all this.
Coda was right there, frost pouring from her eyes within the ice block. If she was free right now, if she could feel this, would it convince her of the futility of her cause? Would it convince her to abandon her faithful and let me give her a normal life, faced with how insurmountable of a fight she had picked?
...I wasn't sure it would. It might rightfully convince her she needed a stronger power source. But having felt this myself, for the first time having begun to fathom the depths of what drove my mother, I found myself wanting to fight her in Coda's place. To take on that responsibility, destroy her, and release her from this curse once and for all.
Bernard gave the signal that the entrance was free. Swiftly, as silently as we were able, we dashed into the ziggurat.