Devourer

by Croabadrake

Chapter Six: Confrontation

The sun was setting as she awoke. Luna looked around the room to see her guards still stationed and alert; they gave her a concerned look at her panic. She calmed herself and began collecting her thoughts. She looked back through what she had learned in the dream… a chill ran down her spine when she remembered the Devourer somehow overcoming her ability to become invisible to the dreamer. A thought suddenly hit her: did it remember the dream? Had she remembered to make sure she used her ability to make it forget? And even so, would it have worked?

Luna decided to not wait and find out. She commanded her guards to follow her and they left the bedroom, headed for the throne room. She needed to tell her sister what she had seen, and hoped that the Devourer didn’t remember her presence. She also needed to tell Shining Armor, who she hoped was still delivering his daily report on his findings to her sister.

Luna ran into the throne room, to see that her sister had not gone to bed yet. Luckily enough, Shining Armor was there too just as she’d hoped. As she approached, she noticed one of the servants speaking to Celestia. Judging by Celestia’s annoyed expression, the servant’s presence was unexpected. Luna got within earshot.

“And then, your majesty, I swear it’s true! I heard it, I heard his voice!” the servant said. She seemed to be in a panicking.
“For the last time,” Celestia said wearily, “who did you hear?”
The servant hesitated for a moment before blurting out the name: “Discord!”
Celestia’s ears suddenly perked up, and so did Luna’s. “You mean to tell me that you heard him out in the garden?” Celestia asked.
“Yes, yes, I heard his voice! I can’t have mistaken it, your majesty, after hearing him when he took over that time long ago! It had to have been him!”
Luna spoke up. “Where were you to the statue when you heard him?” she asked, fearful for the answer. Celestia and Shining Armor seemed surprised, apparently having just noticed her.
The servant looked confused for a moment before answering. “I… I was at the south end of the garden, in the section where he’s kept…”

Luna’s eyes grew a bit wider as she thought of which side of his garden was closest to Canterlot: something from the dream clicked. The Devourer had mentioned that the one he called Father Chaos had an acolyte: his greatest creation, as described by the Devourer. Such a being would have had immense power when dealing with chaos, and was mentioned to have failed in conquering something, either the world or Equestria, two separate times. She’d already thought about the possibility of this acolyte being Discord, but now there was significantly less doubt. She didn’t recall Discord ever mentioning such a thing as whatever it was that created him, but then, he did have a lot of things he didn’t tell.

Celestia looked at Luna. “What would that have to do with the matter?” she asked.
“Oh, there is something I need to speak to you about, sister! And you too, Shining Armor,” Luna replied.
“Should I, um, leave?” the servant asked nervously. Celestia nodded.
“What you’ve told us has been most helpful. Thank you,” she said to the servant, who bowed and hurriedly left.

When she was gone, Shining Armor spoke up. “Well, Princess Luna, I didn’t find anything. How did your sleep go?”
“More revealing than you might think, Shining Armor,” she replied. Celestia nodded to her knowingly.
“Shining Armor, I was able to infiltrate its dream as it slept” she continued.
“You can… enter ponies’ dreams?” Shining Armor said, a look of surprise on his face.
“Indeed, and animals too. I was able to sneak into its dream, and I learned a lot about it while I was there.”

The guards at the door allowed the servant to pass out of the room. She thanked them and began moving back to where she was supposed to be.

“So what do you think they’re talking about in there?” one guard asked the other.
“I don’t know, but it seems like it was important. Princess Luna looked like she was in a hurry.”
“Yeah… I hope it puts them closer to getting rid of the monster.”
“Me too…… hey, what do you think it looks like?”
“Huh?”
“Come on, what do you think the monster looks like? You have to have thought about it.”
“Well… I don’t know. The rumors say it looks like a changeling, so I guess it would look like a really big changeling.”
“Oh come on, you can imagine better than that.”
“I don’t try to think about it, okay?”
“Oh fine.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Do you hear something?”
“What?”
“It’s… kind of like a scratching sound.”
“Scratching sou—… wait, yeah, I hear it too.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Hm… it sounds like it’s coming from the floo—“

There was a tremendous cracking noise as a pillar of black smoke headed by two glowing yellow eyes and a ring of teeth erupted from a hole in the floor beneath them that had suddenly appeared. The eyes flashed and a small anti-magic field enveloped the guards, nullifying the stunning spells they were readying in self-defense. The smoke then turned into an armored black carapace and two long arms reached out to grasp each guard.

“—and then I heard what the ponies at the table were saying,” Luna continued after describing the dream’s unusual initial appearance and the scene she first saw.
“You say that these ponies are ones that went missing?” Celestia asked.
“Yes, most of them were. Others seemed to be normal ponies, possibly from Canterlot.”
Shining Armor looked down in thought as he spoke. “But if the dream included ponies from Canterlot… does that mean it’s been capturing ponies from there too?”
“I do not know,” Luna said. “If it was, though, you would think the news would have covered it. I think they were random manifestations, as dreams do sometimes.”

The conversation was suddenly interrupted by loud screams near the entrance to the throne room. The three looked to the door as a heavy thud echoed through the room, accompanied by the sound of wood splintering. They, as well as the guards in the room, looked on in shock as a reverse indentation appeared in the door with the noise and one of the pair of screaming voices stopped. There was a massive clang, the sound of armor being struck—hard—and the other voice quieted. There was then silence.

Shining Armor was the first to break out of the stupor the sounds had inflicted on everypony in the room. He ran towards the door: those were his men, and he wasn’t about to just stand by and let this thing get away again!

Turns out he shouldn’t have bothered.

“Stay there…” it whispered to the two unconscious guards behind it in the tunnel it had dug underneath them. It advanced forward, rapidly digging away a tunnel slightly further in the direction of the one pony it was after right at this moment.

Shining Armor had almost reached the door when he heard a sound coming from underneath the floor. He stopped, but was still too close when a huge black figure burst roaring from the floor directly in front of him, the upward force of its arms hitting him like an invisible wall and sending him skidding backwards. The creature before him continued to roar and raised its arms, slamming them down to either side of itself and then pushing itself the rest of the way out of the floor. It stood its full nine-foot height and looked around the room, shaking off debris from under the ground and what it had broken through to surface.

The guards in the room reacted quickly, firing bursts of stunning energy at it. A total of eight elite guards in the room, all of them firing at the Devourer… and not a single one seemed to be having an effect. The beams hit the Devourer, but each beam seemed to simply vanish into its carapace without causing it any pain.

Princess Celestia rose into the air, having seen the lesser attacks not having any effect. She gathered her power into her horn and then directed it at the Devourer with the same ferocity she had attacked Queen Chrysalis with on the day of the royal wedding. A tremendously powerful beam of focused light flew directly into the Devourer’s chest, a direct hit… with the same effect that the guards’ attacks had.

The Devourer gathered a large breath and then roared again, but this one seemed different. The roar seemed to have an unnatural echo, and startled all of the guards into ceasing their assault. Celestia wasn’t fazed, but stopped firing by choice seeing that even her lethality-intended beam wasn’t having any effect. The creature allowed its spread fear aura to take hold of the guards before finally scanning the room, letting its eyes come to a stop on its target. It raised a claw and pointed to Princess Luna, who had drawn back behind a shield that Shining Armor had created upon recovery.

“YOU,” it screamed in a voice nearly as loud as its roar had been. Its voice was, as Luna suspected, the grating, gurgling voice it had ended the dream with.
“YOU. I AM HERE…… FOR YOU,” it continued, the menace in its voice driving Celestia to stand in front of Luna and Shining Armor to reinforce the shield in front of all three of them. The guards were still too stunned to do anything.
“I DO NOT CARE… IF THEY KNOW ABOUT THE TUNNELS,” it continued further. “I DO NOT CARE IF THEY KNOW THAT I ALLY MYSELF WITH THE CHANGELINGS, AND I DO NOT CARE THAT YOU KNOW I DREAM AS THE REST OF YOU.”
It raised its other hand in a grasping position towards Luna. “BUT IF YOU SO MUCH AS BREATHE A WORD TO THEM ABOUT WHAT I AM OR MY CONNECTION TO MY SWARM…..”
It lowered its voice at last into a menacing, but still clearly audible growl: “I will crush your legs in my jaws, rip your wings from your back and gnaw your horn from your skull, and then I will devour everything you know and love before you…… but before that…”
It paused for an agonizing moment. “I’ll start killing the prisoners. It’s bad enough I have to steal actual food to feed them, so it’ll be VERY satisfying to tear out their throats, one by one.”
Shining Armor let out a sigh of relief at hearing that the taken ponies were not dead. He tensed as the Devourer pointed to him. “And just for you,” it said slowly, “I’ll start with the servants. The laborers. Your warriors will get to watch as those they are supposed to protect, that YOU are supposed to protect, are eviscerated in front of them. Slowly.”

Shining Armor and the princesses flinched at the thought as the guards finally recovered. They pointed their horns at the Devourer, unsure of what to do. It ignored them and began speaking again.

“Now then…. If you want to stop me……”
A long, evil grin broke out along its face.
“You’ll have to catch me.”

The Devourer broke out into a sprint, breaking its way through the doors to the room with ease and knocking aside several guards on the other side that had come to investigate the earlier noise. It turned and took off down a hallway as Shining Armor and the Princesses gave pursuit.

A speck appeared on the horizon. The scouts focused their attention to it, hoping it was who they thought it was. Their suspicions and hopes were filled when it got close enough that they could make out its blue helmet.

“Commander Dapul has returned!” they collectively called out over the village. There was much cheering in the crowd outside, as well as from those emerging from the structures.

Queen Chrysalis rose from her resting place and walked among her swarm to greet Dapul. He had almost reached the village by now, with the scouts calling out his estimated distance every few seconds to keep the crowd going. When Dapul finally reached the village boundaries, the crowd erupted in one final bout of cheering and swarmed over him, patting him on the back and hugging him. Ironically, he was nearly crushed in their joy before a green glow set about him and he rose into the air.

“Calm down, my swarm,” Queen Chrysalis said as she levitated Dapul over to the podium the swarm had made for her to give commands from some time back. They’d even done it without her asking.
Queen Chrysalis set Dapul down next to her and allowed him to bow before she spoke. “Dapul, what news do you bring of the hive? Is it safe?”
“Yes, your majesty,” he answered. Queen Chrysalis noticed that he had a few cuts on his back and more dents in his armor than when he left.
“What happened to you, Dapul?” She asked.
“Your majesty, a pride of manticores had taken up residence in the hive in our absence. Many were killed by the traps, but some had survived and were making a den out of it. I lured them into the remaining traps, though I had a little trouble.”
“And did you reset the traps when they were done with?”
“Yes, and I moved their corpses to the food pods. I made sure everything was in order: the food pods were still closed, the traps cleaned and in peak condition, and even made sure none of the beasts had hidden themselves in the Devourer’s den.”
Queen Chrysalis smiled. “Well done, Commander Dapul! When we reach the hive together, you may be looking forward to a promotion!”

Dapul smiled with glee and did a little dance, too happy at having survived the journey and having gotten a compliment from the queen herself to contain his joy. It didn’t last long, though, once he realized he was doing it in front of her. He stopped, saluted, and then joined the ranks of his siblings.

Queen Chrysalis stepped up to the podium. She began to speak, but closed her mouth and listened intently before she said a word. A confused look washed over the crowd, but then they sensed it to. There was a magical signal coming. A few seconds later, a voice boomed over the crowd, shocking many of them.

“I’M EATING AT THE MOMENT. CALL AGAIN LATER.”

Queen Chrysalis smiled as the crowd had a variety of quiet reactions to hearing the Devourer's voice. “My swarm, we have one more thing to do before we depart for the nest…”

The swarm knew what she meant. They parted their way to the locus that they used to send out signals as she hovered over to it. They gathered and concentrated their power into it as she readied the message to send back to the Devourer. After a few brief moments, she sent the signal through the locus, which then formed the collected energy into a communication spell and sent it towards Canterlot. Just as before, there was a small *boom* sound as it breached the banishing spell’s boundary. The swarm watched it travel out of view as Chrysalis turned to Dapul.

“Dapul, did you leave the teleport beacon on a timer?”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“Appropriately timed?”
“It should be active here in a few hours, your majesty.”
“Good.”