“You can’t keep doing this.”
Burly didn’t bother answering, instead tilting his head back as he drained the last of the whiskey barrel that he’d brought with him. The soldiers who’d escorted him here had tried to take it from him, saying some crap about it being highly improper to drink in the presence of the queen, but after he’d broken the legs of the pair who’d tried to take it from him, they’d shut up about it.
Fortunately, none of them had tried to smash the barrel outright.
If they had, he would’ve needed to kill them.
“The war is over,” continued Iliana, her tone measured and patient. Or at least, that was probably how she sounded to other people. To Burly, she just sounded wooden and insincere, like she was reading lines off a page. “All of the tribes are unified now. There’s no one left to fight.”
Burly slammed the barrel down, letting out a thunderous belch before smacking his lips and glancing at the queen. “Sure must look that way in your fancy throne room here,” he snorted, waving a hoof at the opulent hall surrounding the queen’s audience chamber. “But lemme tell ya, queeny, it’s a lot different out there.”
That got a reaction out of her. It wasn’t much – her lips pursed ever-so-slightly for a brief instant – but he knew her well enough to know she hadn’t liked that. Served her right, preachy bitch.
“I understand that there are still tensions-”
“Tensions?” laughed Burly, placing the empty barrel upright in front of him, leaning on it like it was a table at his favorite tavern. It was a shame that Iliana had sent the guards away for their little meeting; he could just imagine them howling at how he was treating their precious queen. “You don’t know the half of it, sweet cheeks. You up an’ told everyone that we’re all one big happy family now, even though just a few years ago everyone out there were all killin’ each other. You really think they’re all gonna stop just ‘cause you’re gave yourself a crown and a fancy title?”
“Two decades is more than just a few years,” replied Iliana, shaking her head slightly. But even that made her mane – a mixture of yellow, orange, and red tresses – swish wildly, as if to shake off the demure style that her barber had probably spent hours trying to arrange. It contrasted sharply with the deep purple robes she wore, designed specifically to complement her figure, having the traits of the unicorn, pegasus, and earth pony tribes. The overall effect was to make her look quite fetching, and Burly knew that there were a lot of ponies who swore that she had to be an incarnation of the Sun Queen herself.
But he knew better.
“That, and a war against the Tribe of Bones’ necromancers,” continued Iliana, “is more than enough reason to put any lingering hatreds to rest. We’ve finally achieved unification. Now it’s time to let it flourish.”
Burly laughed in her face. “Yeah, I’ve heard those clerics and soldiers and all throwin’ that word around. Unification, unification. They go on about it so much it’s probably what they shout when they bust their nut in a bitch.”
He stood up on his hindlegs then, holding his fore-hooves out and pumping his hips as though frantically fornicating. “Ugh, yeah baby! Gonna unify you so hard, you slut! You want it?! You want my unity?! Yeah?! Well here it comes, bitch! Uni-, oh yeah! UNIFICATION!!!”
Snickering at his own performance, he fell back onto all fours, leaning over the barrel again as he grinned at Iliana. “And while they’re doin’ that, everyone else is talkin’ about wantin’ to settle old scores. Only thing stoppin’ them is they still remember what you did to the Bones tribe-”
“That was an accident,” cut in Iliana, a slight edge in her voice.
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of ‘accidents’ happenin’ out there now,” he shrugged.
“And was what happened in the marketplace an accident as well?”
Rolling his eyes, Burly scoffed. “Like your guards didn’t already tell you everythin’.”
“They gave me a summary of what happened, but they weren’t there,” replied Iliana evenly. “I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Nothin’ to hear,” he shot back with a smirk. “Some punks talkin’ trash about stuff that happened way back when. I very nicely told them to keep their traps shut, and they flew off the handle.”
Iliana simply stared at him for a long moment. Burly met her gaze, his smirk not wavering in the slightest.
Finally, the queen spoke. “Five dead. Seven more injured badly enough that they needed to be given healing magic at the scene. Three shops completely destroyed. Two others judged to be damaged badly enough that they’re unsafe to use until repairs can be completed.”
“Which for me is holding back,” retorted Burly, enjoying himself quite a bit.
Iliana quirked a brow. “Was it? Because I asked for the report of the sergeant who oversaw the identification of the dead. As it turns out, all five of them were from the Blue Moon clan.”
Burly suddenly found himself wishing he’d brought a second barrel with him. “That so? News to me.”
“Burly...Blue Moon is dead. His children are dead. You killed them – all of them – yourself, during the siege of Arcys. You don’t need to take revenge on his entire bloodline.”
“Sounds like he ain’t got much of a bloodline left no more,” yawned Burly, one hoof reaching back to scratch himself.
“I understand that you’re still angry,” ventured Iliana after a moment’s hesitation. “After what Blue Moon did-”
“You’re not goin’ there,” cut in Burly, no longer smirking.
“-which is why I wanted you to fight for me. And you did an excellent job of it, so much so that you earned a blessing from Blaze herself-”
She had just gone too far. In a single motion, Burly righted himself and kicked the barrel, sending it flying toward Iliana. Or at least, it should have gone toward Iliana. Somehow, the arc carried it just past her head, hitting the wall and exploding into splinters, none of which seemed to touch her.
But at the moment, Burly couldn’t have cared less about whatever wuss magic the queen was using. “I told you never to mention that bitch to me!”
“Burly...”
The look in Iliana’s eyes then wasn’t outrage, nor was it fear. Instead, it was pity, and that only made things worse, his anger suddenly climbing.
But it wasn’t Iliana he was angry with.
“After!” he spat, the word bitter on his tongue. “She gives me her so-called blessing AFTER Blue Moon came to my village! I’d said my damn prayers every damn day at noon, just like I was supposed to, and she finally answers me less than a day AFTER what happened!”
“I know,” sighed Iliana, her expression sorrowful. “But all that everyone else knows is that you’re her champion, and that you’re unstoppable on the battlefield. When ponies see you reviving old grudges, they take it as a sign from Blaze-”
“STOP SAYING HER NAME!!!”
“-that the war isn’t over. It’s endangering the peace we’ve worked so hard to build-”
“NO! No, you worked hard to build your freakin’ peace! I worked hard to kill the pony who took everything from me! And now you’re telling me to just sit back and play nice while his whelps talk about what a tragic figure he was?! Like he was some sort of misunderstood noble who just wanted to retake his ancestral lands?! NO! No freakin’ way! Screw the peace, and screw you if you think I’m sittin’ back and listenin’ to that crap!”
Iliana closed her eyes for a long moment, taking a deep breath. “Then, would it help if I offered you a place where you’d never have to hear such things again?”
Burly’s eyes narrowed. So now they were finally getting to what this was really about. “Meanin’ what?”
“My cartographers have noted a small island off the northwestern coast. I’m thinking of giving it to the anteans.”
Despite himself, Burly’s ears perked up. “Who’s there that you want dead?”
A disappointed look crossed the queen’s face. “No, Burly, this isn’t an invasion. The preliminary reports say that the island is uninhabited. You and the other anteans can go there and start over, found new lives for yourselves.”
She had to be kidding. “All that prattle about unification, and now you’re wantin’ to send us away?”
“The anteans were among the finest of fighters, and the ponies we fought to unify knew it,” answered Iliana, ever the honey-tongued politician. “No tribe suffered more during the fighting than yours. Unification is important, but so is healing. More than anyone else, the anteans deserve a land of their own.”
Anyone else would have bought it. Burly wasn’t sure if it was some bit of wuss magic she used, or if other ponies were too caught up in how she was a pegacorn (or whatever it was that they were calling her now) whose brand of destiny was a sun with a crown inside it, or if everyone else just wanted in her cooch so bad that they were willing to believe whatever she told them. But for whatever reason, when Iliana talked, people just seemed to eat it up.
Burly, however, had known her during the Wars of Unification. He’d been there when she’d given orders to set fire to buildings where holdouts of armed nobles had taken refuge, refusing to surrender. He’d seen her use spells to confuse contingents of enemy soldiers in battle, brother no longer able to recognize brother as they slaughtered each other in a fit of mad hallucinations. He’d watched as she’d overseen the execution of prisoners who been caught trying to spy on their captors, or sabotage her army, or even simply attempted to escape, even when they’d cried and pled for mercy.
For all her garbage talk about wanting to bring all of the tribes and kingdoms of ponies together in unity, there was a pragmatic side to Iliana, one that Burly knew was always lurking just beneath her “we’re all one tribe” crap.
“You know what I think?” he said at last. “I think the other anteans don’t want to be here, the rest of the ponies don’t want them here, and you’re just makin’ it sound like this whole island-thing is somethin’ you’re doin’ outta the goodness of your heart when it’s actually probably not even your idea to begin with.”
“Does that mean you’d prefer to stay?”
Burly almost laughed at her obvious dodge. “You mean instead of going off to some patch of dirt in the middle of the ocean, where there’s no booze, no collection of different tribes’ worth of poon to sample, and no chance of another war breaking out? Yeah,” he chuckled, his voice thick with sarcasm, “it’s hard to believe I’d rather stay here.”
That, and he doubted he could even have gone to that island if he wanted to.
That was another reason he hated Blaze. That she’d given him the power to defeat an army on his own mere hours after it would have done him any good was bad enough, but she’d also made it impossible for him to just up and quit Iliana’s little empire. No, Blaze was a pony goddess, so she wanted him right there among the ponies, probably because she was pushing for another large-scale outbreak of fighting. Which was no doubt why, if he ventured more than a couple days out from the nearest pony settlement, he’d find his gravity magic flaring up on its own, dragging him back toward his own kind.
And as far as he knew, Iliana had conquered all of the pony lands on Everglow now, which meant that he was stuck here.
Not that it really mattered, since he wouldn’t have wanted to go to some island anyway; he’d never learned how to swim.
“Speakin’ of hooch and cooch, I’m gonna go grab me some of both. Call me if there’s some troublemakers you need killed.”
He didn’t bother waiting for an answer, turning and walking out of the throne room, knowing that Iliana wouldn’t stop him.
His last sentence had seen to that.
For all that he knew she was probably ready to tear her mane out over him, she couldn’t afford to do anything to stop him. He was a one-stallion army, and had the war record to prove it. So long as he and Iliana weren’t at each other’s throats, then all the troublemakers who were itching to depose Iliana and either take her empire for themselves or carve it up into pieces would assume that he was still in her corner. That alone would make them think twice about openly rebelling against her.
And although there had been several ponies who’d approached him about joining some uprising, promising him all sorts of crap if he helped them overthrow the queen, he’d turned them all down.
Iliana was a stuck-up nag, but overthrowing her would have given Blaze the civil war that Burly felt sure she wanted.
Burly liked fighting; he liked how it made everything else fall away, giving him a rush better than any mare or any booze ever could. But fighting mobs of weaklings was the exact opposite of that, and even real armies could barely get him worked up anymore. Overthrowing Iliana wouldn’t give him the fight he wanted; if anything, it’d probably just drive the really strong guys away. Better to let her grow her little empire and maybe, just maybe, she’d develop some decent guards or bring in some traveling warriors or something.
But until she did, or someone else showed up who was worth getting fired up over, there was nothing else to do but get drunk, get laid, and get into trouble.
Hopefully the bar would be open by the time he got back...
“Burly? Hell’re you doin’ here?”
“Eh?” Blearily opening his eyes, Burly looked around, finding that he was in his favorite dive bar in Viljatown. “What’s goin’ on? And why ain’t I got a drink in front of me?”
“‘Cuz I just got here to open the place up,” answered the barkeep, a crusty old earth stallion who was missing an eye, most of one ear, and several teeth. “And since you weren’t here when I left yesterday, and the walls ain’t broken down, I know you didn’t sleep here. So what’re you doing here now?”
“I...dunno...” Furrowing his brow. “I was mixin’ it up with some titan or other...and there were these elves there, and some wolf chick, and then there was this hot redhead...next thing I know I was dreamin’ about the old days, then you woke me up.”
“Sounds like a crazy dream,” answered the bartender, putting a drink down in front of Burly, knowing better than to ask for any money. Fortunately, Viljatown’s officials paid him to make sure that Burly could get as sloshed as he wanted whenever he felt like it; he was less likely to knock down buildings or accost the local mares when he was drunk. “Redhead sounds nice, though. Always been partial to redheads. Wish I dreamed about ‘em more instead of having to rent them from Kara’s temple.”
“A dream...” Burly frowned, then knocked back half of the mug in a single gulp. “Ain’t dreamed about a fight like that in a long time. Could’a sworn it was real.”
“Hah! If it was, then I call dibs on the chick!”
“Fine by me,” shrugged Burly, finishing his drink. “I’d rather fight that titan again, he was damn tough.”
“No kidding?” The barkeep already had another one ready. “Even for you?”
“Even for me. Whole bunch’a powers and stuff, could even use wuss magic pretty good. Weird name though.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
Burly took a moment to drain his next mug entirely, a grin crossing his features as the identity of his mysterious opponent came back to him.
“Lex Legis.”