"Have you ever felt more alive?" Rhodallis asked, another revenant crackling and collapsing into scrap metal, its energies drained by his hoof. "I'm never more myself than when I come down here. Honestly, I don't know why I don't come here more often."
He certainly looked alive. I was flagging, the long hike and heavy armor and multiple solo fights early on all taking their toll. Even without that, the city's atmosphere took a constant presence of mind to push back, an extra weight draped around me that slowly, inexorably was wearing me down. But for some reason, the same factors were invigorating the pirate king, and I almost swore there was a bounce in his step.
His angry, heavy, perpetually serious step. It was a very uncanny bounce.
"I'm... not so sure?" I responded warily. "Are you sure you're feeling alright? You're not acting like you normally do. And before we entered, you warned me not to trust anything that happened down here as being real."
Rhodallis just chuckled. I caught a glimpse of his eyes, and they were filled with a cruel, torturer's glee.
This was bad news.
I followed him down another staircase, and the claustrophobic, square metal tunnels we had been trekking through suddenly gave way to somewhere bright. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but we appeared to be high up on a wall overlooking a very broad cavern, probably about the size of the surface city's walls. The bottom was sloped and heavily developed with cluttered, trashy ruins in a very different style from the absolutist architecture that dominated the surface city interior. All of it was wasted, and sporadic green bonfires provided the illumination. The fires that consumed this portion of the city never seemed to have gone out.
"What is this?" I asked, my eyes tracing the rivers of green fumes rising from the fires, twisting strangely coherent paths through the air, and ultimately rising to the ceiling, an industrial platform that probably supported the bulk of the city above.
"This is the original city," Rhodallis explained, showing no signs of irritation whatsoever at my constant questions, even though I felt like he could murder an entire village without batting an eye. "Long ago, they said Garsheeva made this crater to provide shelter against the winds. The new city, covering it up... that was all built within the last hundred years. A symbol of progress, they called it. Paving over their history and trying to make the land look flat again, like anywhere else. And then they kept the old city around as a place to put creatures too poor to afford a life with sunlight."
He spat the words with passion and conviction, the ruins below easily visible, even though at this distance the green mist should have hopelessly obscured them. And yet it didn't, as if it wanted this to be seen.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "I appreciate it, but what's it matter?"
"Can't you hear it?" Rhodallis asked, breathing deeply in. "Because they want to be remembered."
The muttering in the mist assaulted me, voices scratching and groping at my mind. But when he put it like, that, the reason why was obvious: they wanted to be heard.
I wondered what it would take, what kind of time and capacity and fortitude it would require to let them in, to hear out every single soul that had carved this chorus into the air, to learn their names and their desires and remember each and every one of them. And then I remembered myself, sitting under a lonely sky in Icereach and staring up at the heavens, wondering who - if anyone - might be out there.
It wasn't just the creatures who had left this place behind, whose desires still lived on more actively in my mother. It was everyone. Everyone wanted to be remembered, not just the ones whose echoes permeated this place.
A job like that was fit only for a god.
We descended, climbing down a complicated set of scaffolding on what I guessed was a central support pillar of the city above. We passed more revenants, each one making me question anew what Rhodallis was, what he was doing, and how that related to Chrysalis. We reached the ground, and the fire on the revenants grew brighter, Rhodallis dispatching a massive one that looked like a tree with the body and legs of a spider and a single massive wing growing from its trunk.
We traversed ruined alleyways blocked by blown-out buildings, streets laid out without regard for any form of planning. We found another staircase, descended into a long-dry sewer tunnel, passed through a maintenance door, and kept going lower.
The fog thickened. The flames of the revenants grew brighter. That discolored blotch on my vision grew closer, now identifiable as being directly beneath the central support pillar. And I still had absolutely no idea why Rhodallis was taking me here.
When pressed, he wouldn't say.
Eventually, the tunnels opened out into a hexagonal space roughly the size of a small ballroom and made of smooth, polished bricks. Green flames on the pillars provided illumination, burning from what looked like smashed lighting fixtures, as if they remembered where light had once belonged. Artwork and murals adorned the floor and the walls, but my attention was stolen by the huge stone double-door on the opposite wall. It had no frame, looking like it was designed to blend into the wall when closed, except it was wide open, its panels thrown heedlessly ajar.
It looked like a gateway to the void.
"Hey." Rhodallis stopped unexpectedly, though I had been sure he would forge ahead. "Are you holding up?"
No, I wasn't. In fact, I wasn't sure I had a heartbeat anymore, so disorienting was this place to my sense of rightness. I could even be dead right now, and I wouldn't remember being alive enough to tell the difference. But I nodded nonetheless.
Rhodallis frowned at me. "You know that isn't natural, don't you? You see this place. No one but the most foolhardy survives even at the upper levels. At this depth, ordinary ponies couldn't leave without a permanent impression on their psyche, even with me to keep them safe. It's like putting your head in a nutcracker. And sarosians are more vulnerable than most. So why are you holding up?"
I swallowed.
"That's what I brought you here to learn," Rhodallis explained. "You were resistant to the environment of Neo Everlaste Palace. And to my powers. I need to find out why. Now then... we're almost to the core. If you get cold hooves, you're welcome to drop your protections and let me in, just long enough to see what's inside. I'll even leave you intact when I'm finished. Which I'd try to do anyway, but it's harder to make guarantees when force is involved. You understand."
"That's what this is about?" I folded my ears. Nope. I definitely still had a heartbeat. "This is a place of power for you, or something, and you're going to try to use it to muscle your way into my mind."
I remembered Coda, trying to do something similar with her throne and failing miserably.
"I don't expect you to say yes," Rhodallis said. "I don't expect you to be able to say yes. When I questioned you on the ship, you didn't even sound like you knew what you were doing. So think of this as... me finding out for both our sake. Just a little farther."
My ears pressed back. But I saw absolutely no choice but to follow him into the door.
Beyond the door, I no longer saw green fog. Instead, I saw only in shades of green, flames burning upside-down that leaked from the ceiling. The path wound left and right, passing branching corridors and jail cells, its concrete floor cracked by the force of whatever destroyed the city, but otherwise looking surprisingly new.
A collection of pipes ran along the vaulted tunnel ceiling, thin and ribbed and organically woven together like muscle fibers, made of countless segments that interlocked at regular intervals. I had seen pipes like that before recently, in the castle at the edge of the world. If I touched them, would I hear another voice? They looked like the pipes in Coda's ship that connected her throne to the prayer altars, as well.
Acting on a hunch, I pressed my face to a grate covering one of the jail cells - made of shiny, new, black-painted steel. A revenant in the corner didn't notice me, this one shaped like an amorphous blob. But on the right wall, there was a statue of a batpony, forelegs extended and mouth open in agony, its hips and hind legs buried in the wall as if it had been trapped in wet concrete.
I looked from its mouth back to the pipes on the ceiling. I remembered what Rhodallis had said this place was used for. There was no doubt about it: this was the prototype, the original version of Coda's airship, taking the feelings shared by creatures at the altars and funneling them into a changeling queen. Only while Coda had been gorged on cheap flattery and shallow praise, these altars had taken in the misery and despair of the imprisoned.
"These weren't just for any old prisoners," Rhodallis said, noticing as I stopped and stared. "The punishment for heresy against Garsheeva was death by ritual sacrifice. This place is where those sacrifices were kept."
I felt my skin crawl. The same Garsheeva who talked me into trying again in Ironridge, before I climbed to the bottom of the world and rescued the dying Flame of Kindness?
Actually... I deflated. Why was I even surprised?
Rhodallis beckoned for me to follow, and I kept walking.
After a while, of several more staircases and branches and cells, following the pipes at every intersection and taking the path where they were the thickest, I became aware of Procyon, hovering alongside me. This was... the first time I had seen her since coming to the Empire? But she always came and went as she pleased.
"Don't acknowledge my presence," she said, her voice low and frustrated. "Don't want to give him any ideas."
Rhodallis wasn't watching me, so I gave the tiniest of nods.
"You realize what's going on here, right?" she asked, not expecting an answer. "You've put all the twos together, you know what you have on the table?"
Maybe, but if I was going to get anything helpful out of her...
"Your mind is protected by multiple factors," Procyon said. "Part of it is our split nature. Being fragmented like this... It gives you more leeway to run from things you aren't strong enough to handle, to always answer a problem with the best part of yourself. Another part of it is your identity as a changeling queen. Even an empty queen, even having ran away long ago from parts of your powers..."
She shook her head. "But the most powerful component is a shield made from Unnrus-kaeljos' power. I believe he gave you that shield when I was taken, in order to hide what was done to you... Our split nature; the composition of your soul. The laws of reality push him out. That shield is necessary to cover up evidence of what he did, and I don't know what would happen if it was gone. It could be anything from me being forcibly re-integrated into you, to you being pulled entirely into the void where I was kept, and trapped there for eternity. I think that shield also conceals your nature as a changeling queen. So even in the best case, if Rhodallis breaks that shield, he'll find out who you are and you could become the next thing he tries to sell to random cults to use as an emotional sponge. He wants to see what's inside you because he wants the source of your power for himself, but if he gets in he'll wind up with so much more. You can't let that happen."
Great speech. Really, really heartening-
"I don't know what will win out if you do nothing," Procyon said, interrupting a train of thought she probably couldn't hear: unlike Faye, she had never responded to telepathic communication. "The power of Unnrus-kaeljos is formidable, but so are the memories in this place. Holding them back would be like trying to push a boulder up a waxed slope, or to change the course of a dried riverbank by adding more water. The residual willpower of countless dead mortals, versus that of one god..."
I waited for her to reach her point. Above, the pipes had become too numerous to be contained by the ceiling alone, and were branching down onto the walls, thicker and thicker bundles joining up at every intersection. The blotch in my vision was just ahead.
"But this place is special," Procyon continued. "It's a scar on the world. The normal laws of reality don't have as much purchase here. What that means is, the forces tying me to the void - and all of our powers that I took with us when I left - aren't so strong here. In other words, I might be able to help you in a more tangible fashion than usual. So when he tries again to get inside your mind, don't give up without a fight."
And then she was gone.
The pipes completed their encapsulation of the tunnel, becoming the walls and the floor on which I walked. No mysterious new voices greeted me as my booted hooves touched them, but the muttering changed: instead of a sea of voices surging and trying to speak over each other, they felt frozen in time, as if each one was uttering a single idea, a single syllable, and stopped where they were at the end of the world. The pipes twisted and constricted, merging into each other like blood veins as the tunnel circled and descended in a spiral, until at last they opened out into a final chamber, a brick pillar in the middle rising from baleful emerald depths.
Rhodallis strode toward it on a bridge of pipes, leaving me to follow. For all Procyon's warnings, for all Rhodallis' inscrutability, for all this place's danger, I couldn't bring myself to turn back.
Having heard those voices, I wanted to see - and remember - the source of all this with my own eyes.
I crested the pillar, a lonely circle in the middle of a high, cylindrical chamber, with huge pipe mouths lining the walls that had probably once poured water into a cistern below, and beheld the rift.
This was the blotch I had seen from the surface, visible through the streets and the walls, a cutout in space that glowed with colors that weren't colors. The air in the room around it felt flimsy and two-dimensional, like I could accidentally tear it by moving in the wrong direction, like I was a higher-order being beholding this scene drawn on a sheet of wet paper. When I moved my eyes toward it, and my vision hit one edge, I found I was instantly looking at the opposite edge instead, as if there was so little inside it that there wasn't even space to spend time moving my eyes across. And yet it also felt the opposite, like I was looking across something so vast, time had to accelerate for me to move my eyes enough to ever look away.
It was a cut-out. It wasn't green. It wasn't pink, it wasn't magenta. It didn't seethe, and yet it roiled, holding still in a state of constant motion, like the edges of the tear were blowing in a dimensional wind. It wasn't even here at all, and yet it spoke to me, a memory echoing into the depths of my soul.
{{DIEEEEEEE...}}
The rift groaned to me, projecting a vision over the room, or over my eyes, or across time and space, the same feeling I got when stabbed by the revenants, when beholding that hollowed-out sun. For a split second, the room was no longer green and burning, but dim, and instead of myself and Rhodallis, there were two mares, both familiar: a dazed Valey and an unconscious Kitty, the former stumbling along and the latter being carried by something I couldn't quite look at, either.
{{PLEASE... HELP... DIEEEEE...}}
"Well?" Rhodallis put a heavy hoof on my shoulder, jolting me back to my senses. "With a look like that, I know it's getting through to you. The memory inscribed in this room. You're not that dense."
I felt like I was going to throw up, struggling to compress the kaleidoscope of my senses back into a single dimension... but, gradually, I succeeded. "What is this?"
"Stanza's deepest desire," Rhodallis said, standing proudly with his chest to the rift. "Chrysalis's throne, the receptacle for all these emotions that stored them here, marinating her soul in them until they were all one and the same. What Stanza wanted, what she wanted, what I want for myself and all the other tormented souls that were touched by the fools who built this place... All they wanted was for it to finally be over."
"Why?" I pressed, my heart pounding against the inside of my armor. "Didn't you just say they wanted to be remembered?"
"They wanted a whole host of things," Rhodallis explained, wearing the green fumes like a mantle. "They hated a whole host of things, the rotten circumstances and miserable lives that brought them to marinate in a place like this. They hated their own weakness, their loneliness, everyone who had ever done them wrong, and everyone who never lifted a hoof to stop it! The mistakes that brought them here, the laws that placed them in the wrong, the goddess and her faithful who enforced those laws, the whole world, everything!"
He spun to face me, pointing an aggressive hoof in my face. "You claimed earlier that you didn't have an opinion on Chrysalis, dodging my questions and equivocating about forgiveness. Well, this is her heart! Take a good look around, kid. Take it all in, and tell me how you feel now!"
And so I looked. The rift, still flickering in my mind with a memory of pleading to die... It was shaped like an alicorn laying upon a throne, constructed from a pipe organ that had been tipped on its back. I didn't know how I could tell, but the more I looked, the more I tried to listen without being overcome, the more I could simply tell. It did want to be remembered. It wanted to be found.
The pipes that formed the bridge to the pillar I stood on snaked up and around, entering the rift organ by becoming its organ pipes... and yet, the pipes in the real world were severed and torn, not lining up with the rift's memory, revealing themselves to be made of a material that looked like thin canvas dipped in molten metal. But the rift was a memory. It wasn't the real thing, the real Stanza, Chrysalis's counterpart to Coda's throne Fugue.
"What happened to it?" I asked. "The throne that was here. Stanza."
Rhodallis shrugged. "Buried a mile deep in a collapsed lab beneath the former capitol of Izvaldi. What's it to you?"
"What's the relationship between a changeling queen and their throne?" I asked.
"Why do you care?" Rhodallis gave me a suspicious look, though he seemed to more suspect I was stalling than up to no good.
"I'm seeing a memory of it asking for help dying," I said, staring into the rift. "I just want to know if that was Stanza talking, or Chrysalis."
"It was an extension of her," Rhodallis explained. "While she was connected to it, at least. Other than that, it was just a machine. This kind of damage, this kind of imprint... Building it requires events to reinforce themselves at a singular point in space. Even though Stanza wasn't even here anymore when Chrysalis embraced her powers, this is the place where the feedback occurred. So now that throne is probably just inert junk."
That didn't sit right with me. Maybe it was just my own quirky relationship with machines, but... they could be people, too.
However Chrysalis felt, wherever she was, I suddenly felt sorry for Stanza, too.
Maybe... if I got the chance, in the future, I would track it down, dig it up, and find a way to give it the rest it deserved. Cleansing this city felt like an impossible challenge, but honoring the memory of one machine, finding and dismantling it, I felt like I could do.
"Anything else?" Rhodallis asked, waiting patiently. "Or shall we get started?"
I turned to face him... and realized there was something I had missed, something so ordinary by comparison that it felt out of place.
It was a dusk statue, normal and mostly unmodified, like the ones in storage in the Icereach bunker. Only instead of a polished, colored gemstone in the choker, this one had a much stranger gem, that pulsed with a small vortex of magic. Otherwise, it didn't seem to be doing anything.
"What's that?" I asked without thinking, pointing a hoof.
"This?" Rhodallis patted the statue. "Just an... observer. Ever hear the maxim about staring into the void, and the void staring back? Some people are curious just how true that is."
He gave me a challenging look.
Procyon appeared, again, beside me. Instead of floating, I noticed, her hooves were making contact with the floor.
"I don't know exactly why you brought me here," I told Rhodallis. "I'm guessing you want my powers for yourself, and took me where you were strongest to try and pry them away. You really can't just live with not knowing?"
Rhodallis shrugged. "Spoken like someone who's tried too hard to convince themself of those very words. I have a goal, and I can never rest until I've seen it through. And you've got an edge I can almost certainly use... and that you're almost certainly underusing. Be honest with yourself. I told you I'd try to leave you all in one piece, and you've followed me all this way without so much as a hint of resistance. You want to know how you work too, don't you?"
I swallowed, the green power backing off just enough to give me room to think.
Of course I wanted to know who and what I was, to have an absolute component to my identity, something I could always lean on to know that I was me. Something I couldn't leave behind when changing houses, or when life took my friends their separate ways. Something that could pierce the uncertainty that came from having multiple selves. But...
"We've literally met each other a few days ago," I pointed out. "Don't pretend you're doing this for my sake."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Rhodallis said, a tiny laugh hidden in his arrogance. "I'm just offering a way for you to look on the bright side... No hard feelings, kid. I need this to accomplish my goal."
I squared my shoulders, realizing I had positioned myself between Rhodallis and the rift, but standing my ground anyway. Why had I done that? It was subconscious, but... of all the possible things to find, and of all the possible times to find it, I found a tiny piece of myself looking to my mother, and hoping she would protect me.
"Are you Chrysalis?" I blurted out, in retaliation to my impulse but also because, having seen him down here, I was legitimately curious.
Rhodallis just shook his head. "I told you. I'm just here to give her what she always knew she deserved. Now, try not to struggle."
His body came alight with green flame, consuming his armor and clothing and melding it into his skin, a black carapace taking shape in its place that I had seen on untransformed changelings and dead ones before them. A long, pockmarked horn grew out of his forehead in a dazzle of sparks, and his wings spread wide, wider, shedding their feathers and splitting down the middle to become dragonfly wings, quite unlike the smaller changelings I had seen before. But his mane survived, powerful and wild, and his eyes never changed, becoming larger and more angular yet retaining their same feel.
On his flank was a special talent of an empty circle, just like Lilith and the others.
This was his true form. But, if he was a changeling queen - changeling king? - he didn't have a crown.
Of course, neither did I.
Rhodallis raised his head, lit his horn, and his emerald aura pulled together the fumes from the air, sucking in more and more, almost restoring a measure of color to the room as they congealed into a lance made from emerald glass that burned inside with emerald flame. And then he flung the lance straight at my head.
My hooves were rooted in place. Something paralyzed me. My usual paralysis. As always. Of course.
But it didn't paralyze Procyon.
She jumped, catching the lance with a hoof and a wing, just as a golden shield materialized around me, a furious plume of sparks erupting as the lance tip bit and drilled into it, both of them working together to push it back. I couldn't tell if the shield was real or in my mind, I couldn't tell if the lance was real or in my mind, a drowning sense of detachment welling up-
Faye tore off her mask.
In one smooth motion, she juked to the side, catching the emerald crystal that composed Halcyon as it fell, and stuffing it into her armor. As the lance tip broke connection with her shield, the weight of inevitability slackened slightly from her shoulders, and she was present again: she could feel the rushing of blood in her ears, the roaring of her emptiness in her heart, the demands of the spear and the room and Rhodallis, all as one voice, that she let them inside.
"No!" Faye cried, the spear dissipating as Rhodallis formed another one and calmly flung it at her. "I am not your tool, and I don't want anything to do with this place!"
Rhodallis let the spear be his reply. Faye tried to dodge again, but it turned in midair, seeking her.
So she rammed it first, Rhodallis' emerald willpower pounding against her, demanding answers, seeking to know.
To know what? Faye pushed back with her thoughts as her words, leaning into the shield, wrapping her own hooves around the spearhead and joining her strength to Procyon's.
The desire in the spear fractured, and Rhodallis was suddenly out of sync with the green mist. He wanted her power; it wanted a host. For just a moment, Rhodallis pushed into her alone, a fiery, caustic curiosity, a determination to stop at nothing, to take whatever he needed to succeed, to break whatever he needed to find what he needed to take...
But what was he looking for?
Faye tried to pull.
Still pushing, still defending herself, still forcing him and the mist out, but she was a changeling queen. Anything he could do, she could do better, adrenaline pounding in her heart as she realized she wasn't afraid: no matter how hard she messed up, no matter how far she fell, she could never repeat the mistakes that led to this.
For once in her life, even though Halcyon had been, she wasn't paralyzed and wanted to fight rather than flee.
"What do you want?" Faye yelled, both through the spear and with her mouth, a surge of strength welling up to pull Rhodallis closer, to stare into him as he wanted to stare into her. "What do you think I have for you? What are you trying to use it for!?"
"You're embracing our power?" Procyon grunted, still struggling to hold back the spear. "You're serious about this?"
Faye let her emptiness answer, grasping at Rhodallis like the mist pulled at her... and he wasn't prepared in the slightest.
"What!?" he grunted, staggering forward. "What is this? What are you!?"
Faye felt him resist, and suddenly her emptiness didn't seem sufficient. Rhodallis was pushing her away, backing out of her orbit, redoubling his efforts to probe her now that she had shown off the ability to fight back.
"You do have something," he panted, gritting his teeth. "Something I need to fulfill my purpose..."
Faye pulled again. She didn't have her bracelet, her changeling queen crown, the true key to wielding her powers, but she did have her own determination: a desire to stop hiding, whetted on the taste of freedom she had forced herself into after Halcyon was taken in the Crystal Empire, and now sharpened by the reality that suddenly, her actions mattered.
She had never been in a life-or-death fight before, ever. And the difference in focus it made was electrifying.
Rhodallis leaned again on the mist, and suddenly, Faye was facing an omnipresent, crushing force that needed to be repelled, a soupy sea of desires attracted to her emptiness, one she rejected and could not afford to take in. But attacking was all she could do; her defenses were reliant only on that shield, and despite all Procyon's efforts, it was beginning to show major fractures.
If only she had a weapon...!
And then, from across the depths of space, something answered her call.
It was a light around her leg, a ghost of a bracelet, held back by the reality that it was countless miles away in Seigetsu's pocket aboard the Immortal Dream, and yet trying regardless. And that reality didn't seem so strong here, as if it was stale, just like the air.
Like she could break it, just by pulling.
Procyon saw her, nodded, and let go of the spear. Then she stepped back, looked down at Faye's leg, took a deep breath... and when she spoke, her voice reverberated with the power of the void.
"Let the shackles be released!"
With a crackle of lightning, the light around Faye's leg intensified into a ring of plasma and then metal, her bracelet settling into place as a familiar weight, its black surface glowing with emerald runes that slowly rotated around the metal, chiseled in impossibly thin lines.
Faye lit her bracelet, and did not hold back.
Everything was captured in her vortex as her body burned with green flames of its own - Rhodallis, the spear, everything. Memories streamed into her, loathsome and bitter, a firehose of sensory feedback too fast to parse, and yet she focused her vision and ignored it, staring deep into Rhodallis, the pirate king flung across the room and now physically stuck to her outstretched hoof. She saw him, saw inside him, looking deeper and deeper, but everything inside him was the same: there was no nuance, no complexity, none of the facets that belonged to a person, to anyone living a complex life. The only thing in Rhodallis was green, and two precise flavors of it: a festering, seething hatred of himself, and a desperate, angry fear of being forgotten. And, as she stared deeper into that pure, volatile sea, she saw his name, too.
Extraneous Hatred of Self and Extraneous Hatred of Abandonment
The words lingered in her vision, traced by letters of fire... and then it became too much. Faye could no longer hide from the consequences of inhaling emotions in this place, and she magically retched, reversing the power of her bracelet and expelling as much of the mist as she could into Rhodallis' chest in a mighty, sickening blast. With a crack, her power convulsed, and he was flung across the room, landing up against the base of the normal dusk statue as her hoof dribbled with green flames.
It felt... much like using her power to attack Duma had, long ago in the vault beneath Snowport. But she was certain she hadn't gotten all the green out. The only thing to do was survive and escape from here. And to do that...
She let her bracelet go out.
Smouldering, Rhodallis lifted his head, staring hollowly at Faye, her bracelet displayed for all to see. "Impossible. That... can't be..."
"I win," Faye said, looming over him. "Now that we've established who's stronger... I'm leaving, and I want Coda. If you want any chance of getting anything more useful out of me, you should cooperate, hand her over freely, and give us a ride out of here. If you don't help me, then I'll go it on my own."
"How?" Rhodallis whispered. "You... Who made you? Who are your parents? Where is your throne? How did we not know...? Did we know? Do any of the... others, like me, know? And what have you taken in to gain such power...?"
"If you want any more answers, I think Coda is a fair price for them. Don't you?" Faye cracked her neck in challenge.
Rhodallis gritted his teeth, his changeling appearance fading away as his normal armor and pegasus stallion guise re-materialized. Faye stared him down. She had this. He was about to break-
Suddenly, the core of the dusk statue changed, somehow. And then it spoke.
"She is mine."
Faye's ears stood straight up. Even Rhodallis looked surprised. The voice the statue spoke with was tired, too tired to be bitter, too tired to be angry... and belonged to a mare who could have been anywhere between twenty and two hundred years of age.
"My firstborn," the dusk statue said. "Coda is the fake."
Faye stared up at the statue, no questions in her mind about who was speaking on the other end.
"My daughter... Find me. I am waiting."
The core changed again, and it spoke no more.
Rhodallis pulled himself to his hooves, his body singed in a way that reminded Faye almost of Mother... though his burns, slowly, were healing. He stared straight at her, aggression banished and replaced by weariness. "Is this true?"
Faye took a step forward. "Is Coda less valuable to you if you know she's a fake?"
Rhodallis growled. "Is. This. True?"
Faye stood her ground.
"Who else knows?" Rhodallis asked, his voice defeated, and yet dangerous, too. "Lilith? Samael? Estael? Zero?"
Faye shook her head.
"What about Cinder?" Rhodallis pressed. "Does she know? Or..."
"If you're talking about anyone with the same special talent you have," Faye interrupted, "I don't usually go around advertising this. Almost nobody knows. But if you're thinking of blackmailing me with this information, know this-"
"Heh." Rhodallis chuckled to himself. "Is that a thing you're keeping under wraps? Don't worry... Your secret's safe with me, at least until the opportune moment. I'll ask you one more time: how do you feel about Chrysalis?"
Faye stood her ground. "I can't... possibly answer that right now."
Rhodallis started up a slow pace towards the exit. "Fake or no, Coda is still valuable to me. It's not her powers I value so much as her reputation... and how that reputation makes my enemies feel. Take her, and I'll send my crew to get her back. Reveal your identity and take her place, and I'll just need to use you for my plans, instead. Or you can work with me, and perhaps we can come up with a plan that works for both of us better than what I originally had in mind. The choice is up to you."
All was quiet aboard the Immortal Dream.
The ship was several days into its flight from Our Town to the Crystal Empire, and the drama of Halcyon's disappearance and the revival of Kindness had mostly faded into the background as the monotony of travel set in.
Various passengers handled the wait in their own ways. For Corsica, it involved the equivalent of mentally hibernating, shutting down and doing nothing whenever no one was around so that she could give more energy during the times when others were. During those times, the only passenger who could even attempt to beat her at waiting calmly and peacefully was Seigetsu, who never lost her cool anyway. So it was somewhat notable when Corsica, napping on a bench in the mess hall and waiting for anything to happen, saw Seigetsu pass by in an almost flustered state.
"What's up?" Corsica raised an eyebrow. "With a look like that, is the engine on fire?"
"No." Seigetsu shook her head. "I've simply misplaced my collateral for the deal with Halcyon..."
"Her bracelet?" Corsica shrugged. "Didn't peg you for the forgetful type. Oh well. It'll turn up somewhere."