“So these are the Griffin Provinces,” Spite commented as she adjusted her course to glide under a bank of clouds, smiling. The line between Equestria and the Provinces was amazingly stark: on one side of the divide was a fertile, verdant, green land and on the other, a monochromatic desert as far as the eye could see, its flat expanse broken only by massive pillars of rock, mesas upon which thriving cities of griffins were built. The walls and structures of the cities weren’t only built on the mesas but even from the distance she was at, Spite could tell that the structures were built though the mesas as well, the gargantuan natural features built into the living spaces of the leonine avians and probably even molded by centuries of patient effort.
“Yup, boring as ever,” Rainbow commented, gliding casually on her back, rear legs crossed as if she was lounging on solid ground. “Most awesome thermals in the world, though.”
“One of the best things about deserts,” Spite sighed happily as she descended low enough to feel the warm, dry air wafting over her wing membranes. “Second only to medusae and sandrunners, at least where I come from.”
“Medusae?” Luna asked as she took a position at Spite’s wing. “That name sounds much like ‘Maredusa’, a gorgon in one of our old foal’s tales.”
“Who, in turn, sounds like Medusa, the girl for whom medusae are named.” Spite closed her eyes, recalling…
…a girl, adult in truth but a quite young in comparison to her, taking Spite’s hand in two of hers the touch pleasantly warm and comfortable, looking slightly up with vibrant, emerald-green serpentine eyes. “I am honored, Spite Drae’thul, to meet the sister of my queen and lady,” she says in a pan pipes voice. “You are beautiful in my sight and the all-knowing sight of the Weaver, made all the lovelier by bonds of family and friendship.” She then stands on tiptoes and warm, whisper-soft lips press against Spite’s forehead in a gesture of friendship and blessing entirely appropriate for a priestess to bestow upon an adherent. With Medusa, though, the chaste kiss on the forehead was inevitably followed by the soft cool scales of her serpent-hair nuzzling softly and briefly at the one their owner had bestowed the mark of affection on.
“Thank you, High Priestess,” Spite had replied with a smile to match the beatific expression on Medusa’s face. “I appreciate your time.”
“My time is for the faithful, and you know the Weaver as well as any.” Medusa had bowed deeply, her palms open and her arms spread, a traditional gesture of harmlessness and peace that the matriarch of her race had somehow picked up, snow-white robes of silk that preserved her modesty while displaying the graceful slimness of her scaled form pooling at her feet. ”Give your sister my best, I pray thee.”
…and she smiled even more broadly, letting her eyes open again. “Who, I might add, is a lovely girl and a well-loved priestess in the semi-religious faith called The Way of the Balanced Hand, the veneration of The Weaver.”
Luna looked at her steadily before smiling a little. “Remembering her?”
“She’s difficult to forget,” Spite chuckled. “She’s young, practically a newborn child in comparison to me, and yet she has immense power in her hands. And what does she do with this terrible and deadly power? She serves as a priestess, one known for being sweet-natured.” She glanced over at Luna. “What do the stories say that Maredusa is like?”
“Our myths are vague on the subject of what kind of being she was, only going so far as to call her a monster and talk about her death at the hooves of a pegasus hero in the distant past,” Luna told her. “Given my own experience with being poorly-understood, I don’t put as much stock in such simple things.”
“Was she real?”
“She is real.” Luna smiled very slightly. “I remembered her from a thousand years ago and visited her after my return to see how she was. She had a daughter, Marr Belle, and was quite pleasant to me, although she is still very prickly when it comes to pegasi and alicorns.”
“Why?” Spite barely jumped at the soft voice of Fluttershy, starting to get used to the supremely unobtrusive pegasus seeming to appear out of nowhere. She was surprised to hear a strong note of sadness in the butter-colored mare’s voice.
“A pegasus, the pegasus that the myths claimed killed her in fact, took advantage of her and broke her heart,” Luna replied with a touch of terseness. “It made her very bitter towards ponies generally and winged ponies specifically.” She gave Fluttershy a reassuring look. “Although if anypony could break through her bitterness, it’d be the Element of Kindness.”
Fluttershy gave her a shy look of gratitude. “Oh, that would be very nice.”
Spite nodded. “Does she live in the griffin lands?”
“No, she lives in the eastern lands. The ones that are uncharted,” Luna admitted. “Which is partly why they’re uncharted: Maredusa is just one of the legendary creatures that shelter there, away from ponykind where they will remain undisturbed and more importantly, won’t hurt anypony.”
“Are they prisoners?”
“Only of their own personal honor and self-interest,” the alicorn replied. “Personal honor, because they gave their word that they’d leave ponykind alone if ponykind left them alone. Self-interest because most of them had suffered at the hooves of ponies, sometimes for good cause and sometimes out of sheer prejudice.”
“That’s…” Spite frowned. “Honestly, that’s sort of sad. If the monsters of your legends are anything like the monsters of my home, their presence would be a joy to your people.”
Luna smiled at this as they descended to skim the sands where the rising heat from the arid soil made gliding effortless. “I’d like to hear about the monsters of your home sometime, Spite. You seem to think fondly of your home’s counterpart to Maredusa, and you didn’t say what sandrunners are.”
“Oh, I could talk for days about the races of the Helles,” Spite beamed. “For example, sandrunners are…”
Precisely what sandrunners were, she didn’t get a chance to say because the sand exploded. More accurately, the tentacled creature of the Void that had been hiding under the sand used its supernatural strength to shove ten times its body weight in sand and sunbaked clay up in a huge geyser, attempting to blind its prey as dozens of barbed tentacles whipped out to grab them. The strike was blindingly fast; the strike was too slow to catch a rainbow-maned pegasus and the terrified friend she hauled out of the way, leaving the tentacles to flail uselessly against thin air.
“Go, Flutters!” Spite heard Rainbow call in the back of her mind that wasn’t occupied with slipping in between the striking appendages with the fluidity that would have made her fellow pole-dancers envious, flicking a few sparks of Light at the passing limbs and letting herself enjoy a moment of satisfaction as a sharp keen of pain slipped from the mostly-concealed being. That was, until she realized that the beast wasn’t recoiling away from her but cringing away from a point just behind her and to the right.
Without the slightest hint of pride or bragging, Luna had casually mentioned acting as the field general when Equestria was forced into war, and offhandedly admitting to having shed blood with her own hooves. Twisting around to see what was causing the Void being to back away, Spite saw that the Princess of the Moon was being modest. Where the beast had two dozen tentacles when it had attacked, six now twitched on the arid ground below, the severed stumps bubbling with an acidic decay from the pair of elegant Darkness blades that twirled with lethal beauty in midair to either side of the alicorn diarch. The lovely and subtle smile of relaxed happiness was gone, replaced by eyes of predatory focus that literally shimmered with the awesome power of a goddess. Silver armor that seemed to be made of moonlight itself covered her from hoof to wing to the tip of her muzzle, sigils of protection literally flowing into place over the gleaming surface that, in the light of the desert sun, momentarily blinded the surprised Void dragoness. The starry twinkle of her mane seemed to flow out into what was visible of her coat, now turned the jet black of the deepest, darkest, hour of nighttime and deep violet magic writhed and sparkled around the lethal-looking spike of Luna’s horn.
“Foul and foolish creature!” Luna cried, her Royal Canterlot Voice vibrating with terrible power, a pulsating physical presence against Spite’s magical senses. “Thou has erred in supposing that thou canst lay thy foul touch upon Us or harm even a hair on Our companions!” She gracefully alighted on the ground before the clearly-surprised Void creature, her blades twirling and sweeping in a deadly dance, particles of sand dancing around her hooves from the power that emanated from her. “In thy arrogance, thou hast drawn the notice of a goddess; reap the fruit of thy folly!”
The chobbath (with the dust clearing, Spite could clearly see the single eye and mass of tentacle-tongues spilling out of a half dozen fanged mouths surrounding it), having recovered from the shock of tentacles being surgically severed by magical blades, emitted a bubbling sound of amused contempt and snaked the rest of its tentacles around to wave in every direction around the grounded mare, a tubelike body stretching forward from one of its tunnels as it reared up and hissed threateningly. With its attention focused totally on Luna, Spite gathered some Light around a paw and flicked it at the giant and heedless being. The resulting warbling shriek was a wall of sound that staggered her, making her briefly falter and just barely twist aside as a tentacle was flung at her in retaliation… only to be hit squarely by the one whipping around from the other direction. Red-hot spikes of pain exploded from her wing, and she found herself quite abruptly on her back and looking up at a pair of snakelike appendages brimming with razor-sharp spines poised to skewer her.
Somehow, it wasn’t particularly surprising when one of those tentacles was the subject of a bone-shattering, four-hoof, high-velocity impact from a cyan streak of pegasus mare that was already out of reach by the time that the outraged chobbath processed what was happening and sought to retaliate. Recovering her wits, Spite gathered some more Light from the abundant source in the sky and directed it into the stream of fire that she spewed at the uninjured tentacle, which was promptly scorched down to a twitching stump, earning another air-throbbing scream from the hapless beast. A moment bought, Spite slipped into the Void on her way to a point several feet above the chobbath where a visibly stunned Fluttershy was flapping weakly, clearly entirely overcome by the horrific sight.
“Wh… what is it…?” She stammered, wide-eyed with warring fear and the deep fascination of a mare that spent her entire life dealing with bad-tempered creatures that invariably became like lambs under her Kind hoof.
“Chobbath,” Spite told her, drifting close enough to offer her a warm body to press against, feeling the mare’s trembling lessen noticeably at the feel of a friendly person physically touching her. “Void beast of hunger and fear. Main body is like a combination of millipede and worm and you can see what the front end is like. Cheap muscle, in the hierarchy of power in the Void, but no less deadly for their absence of status. Not the crispest crackers but a lack of intelligence is usually compensated for by pure presence and power.”
Which, she didn’t feel the need to say aloud, was certainly not the case here. There were a few creatures that could confront a chobbath: dragons bathed their faces in fire and, while the beast was screaming and spitting up charred pieces of not-flesh, they’d drag the thing out of its tunnel and butcher it with little trouble; what the jei and jeikitsu of the Ten Families did to chobbaths (and any other Void creature) was not something any sane person thought too deeply on; and Spite was certain that her sister could dispose of one, if there was a chobbath insane enough to stand its ground against a Prime, especially one of Amarra’s immense power. But dragons possessed immense size and godlike power, the Ten Families fought like frighteningly disciplined cogs in a machine, and every Void creature that didn’t flee in mad terror from a Prime was ancient and powerful enough to be known only by name; Luna was none of these, and yet Spite immediately put her in their company.
In the brief time that Spite had lost line of sight to the alicorn, the chobbath had sacrificed another four tentacles to the princess’ agile bladework and was weaving back and forth, looking for an opening to attack the morsel that was hurting it; with the two it’d lost trying to kill Spite, it now had only a dozen tentacles left. Ordinarily, chobbaths could regrow tentacles like a hydra replaced heads, multiplying every loss by two but whether she knew this or not, Luna severing tentacles with Dark magic had cauterized the stumps with poisonous energy and this only augmented the weakening effect of having limbs cut off. More than just the feat of hurting the hulking creature was the fact that Luna radiated regal contempt at the chobbath’s pathetic attempts to hurt her.
“Come now,” she taunted, the resonant power of her Voice making her as audible as if Spite was standing right next to her, a subtle touch of bemusement in her tone. “Thou art a tentacled horror from this Void. Surely thou canst put a single mark on a little pony. Art thou afraid of the little Princess of the Moon? Art thou holding back out of pity? Shall We wound thee more, cause thee to try harder?”
It may not have been able to understand her but the chobbath clearly understood the amused and contemptuous tone because it burbled with anger and struck with ten of its tentacles at once, each coming in from a different angle, making it impossible to sever all of them before they struck. Luna didn’t even try; her horn flared brightly, releasing her hold on the blade constructs, and what looked like wires of pure concentrated magic shot out towards each of the incoming tentacles, piercing them and then wrapping them in toxic Dark-infused magic. The chobbath screamed, tugging desperately on its trapped appendages, flailing and writhing, and Spite watched with a gaping mouth as veins of violet energy flowed slowly along the captured limbs, causing the Void energy that the chobbath’s physical form was built from to visibly bubble away. It didn’t even seem to occur to the creature to use its last two tentacles to attack its tormentor, merely letting them flop around like a struggling fish as it kept trying to pull free, its fanged mouths drooling and its limp tentacle-tongues twitching as it wailed.
While her prey writhed, Luna walked regally forward towards the center of the creature, her eyes meeting its single giant one as she approached, keeping hold of it and even pulling it forward as she approached. Finally, she was literally eye-to-eye with the chobbath and finally released her hold on its ruined tentacles. The chobbath sagged to the ground, barely coherent from the torturous hold of the alicorn princess’ natural magic on its Void-forged body. Smiling in a terrible, soul-chilling way, Luna raised a hoof and placed it almost gently on the patch of twitching flesh right underneath the massive oculus she was staring into.
“We understand that destroying thee here will but send thee back into the Void to lick thy wounds,” she thundered to it, each word causing the defeated creature to twitch in barely-conscious fear and pain. “We understand that thou art summoned here by another, that thou answereth to a master like his little pet. Tell thy master that this world is Ours and that thou were but an insect upon which Luna, Goddess of the Moon, the Dark, and the Night treads. We bid thy master to remember that We repay our debts and do not forget; We are not Our gentle sister, full of justice and wisdom, but the Mare of the Night, full of vengeance and retribution.” Motes of violet-tinged Dark magic gathered around the hoof she had planted on the chobbath, writhing around the silvery armor and crackling as it built to lethal intensity. “Get thee hence, monster; go back to the Void from which thou spawned!”
The blast of energy was blinding, forcing Spite to look away but the intensity still managed to burn obscuring afterimages into her retinas. When the shadow shape of a disintegrating Void beast faded enough, Spite looked down to see Luna standing there, looking down at the hissing ruins of the chobbath’s head with majestic disdain, the tentacles around her already withering and flaking away into dust, returning back to the formlessness of the Void from which it was drawn to create the similitude of a body. Spite glided to the ground and walked over to the lunar princess, stepping around a sizzling limb and looking towards the tunnel and watching as the Dark magic slowly ate its way into the lightless tube.
“A field general, you say,” she managed after a pregnant silence.
“Yea,” Luna agreed, dousing her horn and letting the accruements dissolve into thin air, her coat returning to its normal appearance and the scarily predatory look disappearing from her face. “It almost pains me that I’ve become so skilled that I can toy with a creature that large and not be injured for my arrogance.”
Spite smiled. “Almost?”
Luna grinned fiercely. “It can be somewhat… pleasurable to play the part of a wrathful goddess. Tia can project the image better than I can but she’s never been on the field of battle; she can only be so convincing when she’s been the strategist and planner but rarely forced to get her hooves dirty.”
“Well, that was an amazing performance, Your Majesty,” Spite told her, looking towards the gaping tunnel. “Chobbaths are ordinarily very hard kills because they can appear from anywhere and few of the things it tries to kill can use Dark or Light magic to seal the stumps of its tentacles after cutting them off. Those are beautiful constructs, by the way.”
“Yeah, Princess! Those were totally awesome!” Rainbow declared as she joined them, a hiding-behind-her-mane Fluttershy in tow. “You destroyed that thing!”
“That she did,” Spite agreed, looking thoughtfully at the tunnel the chobbath left behind. “Your Majesty, it occurs to me that the tunnel the chobbath dug for itself might lead directly back to whoever brought it here.”
“And it occurs to me that I can’t fly in there,” Rainbow pointed out. “And it occurs to me that maybe we want to avoid whatever whistled that creepy thing up. I mean, if he can make something like that obey him, and obey enough that it stayed for Princess to blow its face off, then he can’t be a pushover.”
Spite thought of the arrogant construct she’d faced briefly before she and Rainbow had thrashed him and sent him plummeting to his doom. “I only saw the construct he was using to communicate, but to make one with that power and sophistication at what must have been a great distance speaks of power to spare. Still, I think it telling that he was reluctant to confront me and Princess Luna directly.”
“Let’s not mistake caution for fear,” Luna said chidingly. “The Guardian proved to have little to fear from us, but his plans to oppress the entire world took place slowly, carefully, over thousands of years. Would you say that summoning a…”
“…chobbath…”
“…chobbath requires a great deal of personal power?”
Spite tilted her head, thinking. “Not particularly. They’re regarded as cheap muscle, having virtually no status or importance of their own despite being very large and deadly, and so anyone with a basic modicum of power can use them, primarily as terror weapons. The construct he used to taunt me, however, requires a level of fine control over crafting the substance of the Void that is exclusive to very strong and high-status beings.”
“He didn’t seem to like you much,” Rainbow noted. “I heard ‘deviant’ and ‘blasphemy’ when I was sneaking up on him.”
“I’m really unpopular with Void creatures,” Spite shrugged. “I don’t lose sleep over it.”
“Seems like lots more than ‘unpopular’.” But Rainbow grinned. “To hay with ‘em, right?”
“Right,” Spite agreed. “So this tunnel: bad idea?”
“Bad idea,” Luna and Rainbow said almost simultaneously.
“Then we’ll need to stay higher in case any more chobbaths, or anything lots less pleasant, are hiding under the sand in ambush,” Spite concluded, sweeping into the air with one downdraft of her wings. Her three feathered-wing companions joined her and she waited a moment before looking back at them. “So can anypony suggest a way to figure out which of these mesa cities is hiding our little friend?”
Luna tapped her chin with a hoof. “Did not Consul Halia briefly mention coastal provinces?”
Spite thought back and nodded. “Yes, six coastal ones.” Which, if the capital of the Provinces is in the center and the coastal provinces are furthest from… “Do you happen to know whether the coastal provinces are the ones furthest away from their capital city?”
“The Provinces have no capital city,” Luna replied. “Their central government is a council, and that council meets in a different one of the city-states every month.” She paused thoughtfully. “You’re thinking that whatever’s wormed its way in here is where the council is, and that council happened to be at a point furthest away from their coastal provinces.”
“The point furthest from is the point most difficult to control,” Spite confirmed. “At the very least, the coastal provinces give us a destination and it’s likely that someone there knows where their council is meeting. I wish I had a good idea of its location so I could step us there without wading through whatever creatures are waiting for us.”
“You need to have knowledge of your destination before you can ‘step’ there?” Luna asked.
“I do.”
“So how do you, or any other creatures from other places end up in exactly the place you wish to be when you come here?”
Spite laughed. “With lots and lots of help, Princess. Without Kaiya showing me an accurate representation of Sweet Apple Acres, I would never have found it. With my affinity for deserts, I’d have probably ended up in the middle of a griffin city-state and had much to explain.”
“So if you knew exactly what your destination looked like…”
“Looks like,” Spite corrected her. “As you’re likely aware, teleportation isn’t only moving to a place but a time. You’re using magic to place yourself at a place as it looks in your mind and if that place doesn’t look the way it does in your mind, your reference point is going to be skewed and sometimes skewed dangerously. A photograph of one of the provinces, for example, will only help if what the photograph depicts hasn’t changed much.”
“Is it hard to do?” Rainbow asked, taking position right to the left.
“Quite easy, actually.”
“Then why not do a bunch of jumps?” Rainbow suggested. “You know, get up high so you have a really long line of sight and then teleport to the edge. Just do it over and over again and we’ll get there in no time.”
Spite nodded. “Excellent idea. Thinking of how I jumped ahead of you for the ambush?”
“You don’t get as awesome as I am unless you can learn by doing,” Rainbow grinned rakishly.
><><
Just as she’d assured Rainbow, the multiple short ‘hops’ to the horizon had proven virtually effortless. More importantly, the short and rapid jumping appeared to be dissuading pursuit; in the last three hours, they hadn’t seen anyone, much less the poor victims of the still-nameless Void being that appeared to be Fronck-Kais’ designated representative in the north. The black minister’s movements were still puzzling her. He’d sent Lashaal from the eastern lands, the virtual prison of Equestria’s fantastical creatures, through Ponyville and then towards the Griffin Provinces, but except for meeting two of the Elements of Harmony and nearly killing a third, the apparition seemed to have done nothing useful. Then someone had wired a compulsion into the griffin consul but hadn’t made it fast-acting enough to kill before Luna could dissipate it with her version of mental magic, another instance where Fronck-Kais gained no discernible advantage. Finally, he’d sent a servant who seemed more powerful than the former right hand of Quezelzege could possibly command, to the Provinces to seize control and start turning innocent griffins into expendable foot soldiers. Spite had no doubt that branches of his plan were also to be found in Equestria and the eastern lands, but none of the facts made any sense.
Chobbaths were cheap muscle but you still had to have something to trade for their loyalty, and Fronck-Kais wasn’t known for his overabundance of influence in the Void. Clearly, he’d also obtained the services of another Void being that was emphatically not cheap and had some genuine ability in twisting mortal creatures according to his sick whims. Added to this, the kind of mutation that she’d seen in the griffins took time to perfect even when undertaken by a powerful and experienced experimenter; one didn’t simply make a gesture and poof, instant stable hybrid.
“You seem pensive, Spite,” Luna noted. “Like Tia when she’s figured something out that’s very unpleasant and is trying to hide the fact.”
“There’s something very off-kilter about what we’re seeing,” Spite replied. “Fronck-Kais simply doesn’t have the power and influence to be accomplishing what he is. Several moves have been made with no apparent purpose. The work that the Void being here has done couldn’t have been accomplished in less than a week; not even a being like Phylaxis the Slayer, who was strong enough to take on entire armies in pitched battle, could have gained enough control to have chobbaths patrolling the border this quickly. I’m beginning to fear that we’re seeing the first moves in a much more subtle attempt than Rejnu was capable of to break the rules of the game without it being noticed by the other player.”
“You call this subtle?” Rainbow snorted. “Big tentacled thing wandering around the Provinces?”
“Perhaps it’s not meant to be subtle,” Luna said, thoughtful. “You think it’s meant to attract our attention while the enemy moves elsewhere?”
“That’s certainly a possibility, Your Majesty, but this situation is also much more than mere appearance. The enemy is actually here, for reasons we don’t know, and could potentially accomplish something by it.” Spite shook her head. “No, I think the plan is that the enemy threatens multiple points and forces us to at least investigate all of them. Fortunately, it’s been conveyed to me by a trusted source that powerful help will be meeting Twilight and her friends in the east so they’re at least safer than they were.”
“That’s good,” Luna smiled. “But Rainbow asks a good question: how is something so blatant an example of them being subtle?”
“Because Fronck-Kais cannot have enough personal power to enlist a being of the Void like the one whose construct taunted me, and if that being came here of his own volition, Kaiya would intervene directly and kill him. So he must have appeared to be a perfectly ordinary piece, but concealed so Kaiya didn’t ask questions.”
“Could more than one have done this?”
“It depends.” Spite thought a moment. “In certain circumstances, concepts are considered pieces. For example, the same source that alerted me to the help for Twilight remarked that Kaiya threatened to play the piece representing the concept of something called the Ratnisbonian Inquisition. The actual form this piece could legally take could be anything from a single representative, to the entire Order of the Inquisitors that carried it out, to a vast magical attack that would imitate the effects of the Inquisition.”
“So this Fronck-Kais plays a piece that represents the concept that this being and others fit under…”
“…and an entire slew of beings far too powerful to be in Fronck-Kais’ thrall slip in under the technical cover of the concept, although their presence would provoke lethal retaliation from Kaiya if they’re been brought in individually and openly.” Spite nodded. “It’s extremely clever because the only way the Game could be declared forfeit is if there was direct proof that the rules were violated in that way. I, or another piece, would have to personally witness and speak to one such being and then personally report to either Kaiya or whoever’s moderating the Game.”
Luna frowned. “My testimonial would be insufficient?”
Spite cringed a little, knowing perfectly well how this was going to sound and knowing just as well that it would anger the Princess. “You’re… not regarded as a person under the rules of the Game.”
Eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Well, the world being fought over is considered property and… um… so are the…” Spite dropped her voice to almost Fluttershy proportions, “…residents. And property cannot speak for itself.”
The princess’ eyes bored into her. “Thy Game regards Us as mere property?”
“It’s not my Game,” Spite protested. “And if it helps at all, the pieces are considered property as well. But property representing the player, so they can speak for themselves.”
Luna watched her for a few more moments before sighing and looking away. “This Game is… disagreeable.”
“Everyone, and I mean everyone, despises the Game for one reason or another. But it prevents dozens of virtual gods from descending on any world in dispute and trying to kill each other.” Spite sighed as well. “It’s all we have unless someone can persuade The Weaver and The Reaper to devise something else. And she simply will not do that; devising a structure and rules to prevent all-out world-breaking battles was her initiative after a well-meaning but stupid Ninth Archangel, Kaiya Aon’s predecessor, went after a coalition of Evils and ended up scouring an entire world clean by the time the Evils were destroyed. Over eight billion people and countless trillion creatures and plants, all wiped away in the titanic struggle.”
Luna swallowed audibly. “That is more disagreeable.”
Spite spread her hands. “And thus, the Game.”
“Yeah, well, it bucking sucks,” Rainbow interjected. “Where do these things get off playing with us like we’re marbles? This ‘Kaiya’ lady included… why does she say she ‘owns’ us, like we’re some kinda pretty gem she can keep in a desk drawer?”
“Might makes right,” Spite shrugged. “There’s nothing we can…”
“Does might make Mera right?”
“Well, no, but that’s…”
“Then why does might make Kaiya or this Fronck-Kais jerk right?” The pegasus demanded.
Spite gave her an appraising look. “You know, I knew I liked you right off, before I even met you. Amarra asked me that same question once.”
“So what’d you say?”
“Nothing,” Spite admitted. “I still have no answer to that question. I’ll say, though, that Kaiya does not regard Sol Selune as property; she may call it hers, but her version of ‘ownership’ is keeping it shiny and leaving it alone.”
“So she doesn’t get anything out of keeping it?”
“Personal pride and the respect of her peers but no, nothing tangible.”
“So why does the jerk want it? Seems like a lot of effort to go through to get warm fuzzy feelings.”
“Two reasons: first, he can become extremely wealthy here,” Spite replied. “At the level of power that many Evils and both Primes and Archangels exist at, wealth is measured in what are called ‘prizes’, metaphysical representations of achievements and proofs of their power. The misery, despair, pain, suffering, and corruption he could bring about in such a beautiful place as this would make him the wealthiest Evil in all of existence. The second is that no Evil has ever won a Game in tens of thousands of years of attempts, and Fronck-Kais wants to be the first.”
The three pegasi slowed so they could turn and look at her with surprise. “They’re s.. so horrible but they’ve never… w… won?” Fluttershy asked.
“Never,” Spite confirmed. “Horrible though they may be, they’ve never managed to defeat even the weakest Dark or Light in the Game.”
“Why?”
“Popular theory is that although she’s supposed to be neutral, The Weaver will never permit Evil to obtain a world of their own,” the dragoness replied. “So she twists fate and fortune so that the Evil gets close, but never succeeds. I, however, prefer to think that Dark and Light are simply stronger for being representatives of creation and life.”
“We all like to believe that we’re better simply by virtue of being who we are,” Luna smiled a little sadly. “But I think we should be nearing the coastal provinces by now. A couple more hops should do it.”
“It’ll be nice to get to our destination,” Spite said. “As much as I love deserts, sailing over one that has been smothered by Evil, always watching for some Void beast to explode out of the ground and try to kill me, ruins it for me. Normally, deserts are places of starkness, trial, silence, and a quiet beauty in my eyes but now…”
“…they’ve ruined it for you,” Fluttershy observed quietly, giving Spite a look of sympathy. “They’ve m… made it hostile and filled it with their evil.” She paused and bit her lip. “D… do you think they h… hurt all the little animals too, like they… like they did the griffins?”
Spite considered her, debating. She knew perfectly well that Evils took pleasure in torturing helpless and innocent creatures to assuage their sadism but it seemed cruel to say so to Fluttershy. So she gave the shy pegasus a reassuring smile. “I’m sure they find little creatures beneath their notice and not worth their time, Fluttershy.”
Contrary to her expectations, the attempt at reassurance caused Fluttershy to cringe and draw her legs closer to herself. “Spite, I’ve had good friends that care about me for as long as I can remember,” she said quietly. “Good friends who care about you care enough to lie to you, trying to protect you.” She turned her head and the innocent shy look that she’d shown ever since Spite had first met her faded a little into something entirely different, briefly showing a glimpse of steel that she hadn’t realized the soft-spoken pony had. “I appreciate that you care, but I’m fifteen years too old to be patted on the head and told little lies to spare my feelings. Please, be truthful; it will hurt a moment but so does pulling a thorn out a manticore’s paw, and like that it’ll be better afterwards.”
Spite paused again at the very non-Fluttershy firmness combined with the soothing softness of the very Fluttershy voice and inclined her head to the pegasus to convey respect and apology. “They will actively seek out small, innocent, helpless creatures to torture for amusement and to sate their limitless sadism. They love to watch the pain they inflict, and moreso when their prey can’t fight them.”
Fluttershy cringed again but it was somehow less than the first time. She gave Spite one of her small, beautiful little smiles, now heavily colored with a quiet bravery. “Then it’s good that we can fight back, isn’t it?”
“We can indeed,” Spite assured her, smiling in return before turning her eyes forward to the horizon. “I think just this one hop and I’ll uncase my field glasses to make sure we’re not going to teleport into a battle or something.”
“Field glasses?”
“I’ll show you in a minute.” Spite stared ahead memorizing what she was seeing, holding that image in her mind, extending her inherent self-awareness outwards to touch on the three ponies flying with her, and then there was a brief flash of utter lifeless cold darkness… and they were at the picture in her mind. After a brief glance confirmed that her companions were still with her, she reached into her holding pouch and brought out the spyglass she’d been using to observe Rainbow and Twilight’s practices. “What was it… only two, three days ago?” She murmured to herself as she brought the piece to her eye and let its precisely-ground series of convex and concave lenses magnify the mesa on the far horizon.
Griffin city-states (Luna had explained that the “nation” was more of a coalition of independent provinces rather than a coherent entity) seemed more akin to pieces of installation art than the vast amalgamation of shops, hostels, and entertainment spread out with a manor as the central piece and a towering wall around it. The flat top of the mesa had the familiar wall with certain structures but she could see passage openings riddling the mesa and open-sided walkways had been carved into the sides with generous clearances so that a griffin might come and go at their leisure. At the same time, every one of the passages were chokepoints that could be easily defended… which seemed to be what the griffins were doing.
For a moment, Spite froze a little in shock at just how many griffins their unnamed enemy had seized and infused with the Void—and, based on how many small variations she could see through the spyglass, the Void being was not just modifying them but experimenting as well. Some of his creations were virtually without modification; some were barely recognizable as griffins anymore, looking much closer to feathered dragons than half-eagle half-lion creatures. It was clear that whoever was doing the modification was trying out various alterations to find the best killer and just as clear that he’d somehow gained access to a very large stable of ‘lab rats’ to play with. It was one more indication that something about the speed and nature of this attack just didn’t fit the way a near-nobody like Fronck-Kais played a Game.
“I see them too,” Luna remarked quietly before Spite could say anything. “There’s no possible way that so many griffins could be captured and twisted like this in the short time since you reported Lashaal being in Equestria.”
“More to the point, I can’t imagine this many griffins being captured and used like this without an overt invasion in the short time since the Game began,” Spite replied grimly. “Which means they found a way to slip in early without being noticed.”
“Heh, ‘bout time you figured it out.” Spite jumped a little and looked upwards. For a moment, she thought that the construct had been reconstituted by its controller but then her awareness caught up to her senses and she became aware of three things: first, that this creature had none of the wafting Void energy that the construct did, indicating that this was a real living creature; second, that both voice and the slimmer lines were feminine; and third, that Dash was all but frozen in place, staring at the creature, an expression of horrified recognition stretching across her features.
“Another construct? Really?” Spite snorted, deciding to play stupid to see what the creature would do—and give herself a moment to work out why Dash appeared to recognize the mutated griffiness lounging above them on a small cloud. “Didn’t caving in the last one’s skull send a clear enough message that I’m not interested in discussing your allegedly brilliant schemes with you?”
“Sorry but your mastermind’s in another body, precious,” she smirked. “Which you know, so you’re just fucking with me now to buy time. Which means you’re wasting my time, and that makes me all cranky.”
“Gee, I made one of his playthings cranky at me,” Spite smirked back. “Whatever will I…”
“G… G… Gilda…?” Dash choked out.
“Well hey rainbow-mane, what’s shakin’? You know, other than you.” The mutate grinned malevolently. “Great look, by the way… I love the ‘horrified and sick at heart’ schtick, very you.”
“You… can’t be, that’s not possible…”
The twisted griffin laughed, tapping the side of her head. “Oh, it’s possible, Dashie-poo. I’ve got Gilly-girl right up here, screamin’ her mental lungs off in my head. She knows some colorful ones, let me tell ya. Nice body too, and boy does she have good taste in flank.”
“Enough of this,” Luna all but growled, lifting herself up to the same level as the creature. “Get thee hence or We shall smite thee as We smote the chobbath which evoked Our wrath.”
She looked supremely unconcerned. “Yeah, about that… nasty work there, Nightmare Moon. I thoroughly…”
“Thy corrupt lips profane her name, creature!” The Princess pronounced, her horn starting to glow threateningly. “Thy master knows that We are not Nightmare and thou knowest it as well. And thou art in error… We did not learn to smite Our enemies from Nightmare Moon, she learned it from Us.”
“Yawn, little princess throwing a temper…” Spite had to give the creature credit for speed and reflexes; the lash of Dark magic Luna threw at her failed to wrap around her neck as Luna clearly intended, drawing a bubbling wound across her chest instead as she jumped back. “YOUCH! Hey, you little cunt, that hurt!”
Luna’s eyes narrowed, and the glowing wires of Darkness she’d used against the chobbath snaked out of thin air, weaving and darting like serpents as the armor of moonlight spread over her and her coat turned starry and black. “Stand still and We shall show thee what ‘hurt’ feels like, beast.”
“Wow, OK, turn down the smiting goddess… holy FUCK, cut it out!” Two wires had darted at her, marking her skin with two thin lines of Void energy writhing at the touch of Dark. “I ain’t even threatened you yet, you stupid witch!”
“Thou hast denied a hero of Our nation her rightful rest and taunt one dear to her and to US with her voice,” Luna retorted. “We merely seek to instruct thee in the consequences of such foalishness.”
“Hey Princess Dweeb, this is my voice, my body!” The being growled, coming to rest on another cloud safely out of range of Luna’s wires. “And I ain’t mocking… well, OK, I’m totally fucking with her because that sick expression is just golden… but c’mon, give a girl a break here.”
“We shall be overjoyed to break thee.”
“…OK, points for grabbing the straight line and running with it but… OW! Fucking little… argh!” Luna had taken the abandoned cloud as a platform and swiped at the being with the same two wires as before, inflicting yet more wounds. The draconic eyes of what was apparently Gilda’s body suddenly glowed a vibrant crimson and her pupils simply disappeared.
“My patience for this farce is over,” she snarled, her voice quavering oddly. “You speak of teaching a lesson, infant? So be it.” And just like that, without a gesture or even a pulse of reality being displaced by a massive magical working, the sun was gone. Spite blinked, realized that she could still see the other dimly, and then looked up. Like a vast tidal wave of pure Void matter, hundreds of thick, muscular, barbed tentacles arched over their heads along with a moist rattle that sounded all the world like someone dying of lung sickness desperately trying to suck in a breath.
“More chobbath?” Luna sneered as she calmly watched the tentacles. “Thou supposes that if one fails, many will succeed?”
“Of course not,” the mutate snorted. “I think that if one fails, you simply stitch a few dozen together and feed them a moon princess.”
“Stitch a few dozen together…?”
Spite knew she shouldn’t look because when the cackling Void creature cheerfully mentions melding a few dozen of the already nightmarish chobbath together, there was no way that looking could turn out well. Worse was the fact that chobbath were formless outside of mortal realms, like all things of the Void, so it wasn’t possible to literally take a needle and thread and sew their bodies together. Knowing this, Spite turned around.
She had severely underestimated how insane and demented the Evil frequenting the Griffin Provinces was, she saw. The part of her conscious mind not connected to the sick feeling that churned in her stomach noted that in a very sick way, the nameless Evil was a master of his craft. A few dozen single eyes had been fastidiously dissected and the tissue painstakingly matched and put together to form a gargantuan central eye that was proportionally perfect but from the seams leaked pus and ichor; the eye was literally decaying in its socket, impressive but blind. The Evil had been much less careful with the mouths, or perhaps he simply didn’t care because trembling mouths and their tentacle-like tongues decorated the entire surface of the head, misshapen, facing totally random directions, some even melded into the useless eyelid… some melded the wrong way into the useless eyelid. Void matter dribbed out of the mouths like blood and with a shiver of horror, Spite realized that the sound of gasping, labored breathing was the attempt of a few dozen chobbath trying to scream but in such profound agony that they could do nothing but breathe their torment. It was about this moment that Spite doubled over and began retching, arms clutched around her spasming stomach as it attempted to physically express the revulsion that was too immense for her mind to properly process.
“So this is the fate of those without status in the Void.” Luna’s voice was detached, calm, utterly without emotion or even the slightest hint that the alicorn was rattled. “If thy display is done, doth thou wish to impart the lesson thou intends?”
“I do, in fact,” the creature replied calmly. “Make an uproar in the east and strike in the west.” Spite turned to look at her as she turned her head to a side, apparently looking at someone that Spite couldn’t see. “Eviscerate Kindness. Make Loyalty watch another friend die that she was just too weak to save.”
Somehow, in between the tentacles of the tortured colonial chobbaths arcing over them to block the sun and them turning back from gazing at the thing in abject horror, two of the modified griffins that the Gilda-beast had brought with her had silently seized Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy and now, one of them had a long scything talon resting on the terrified pegasus’ belly while the other had used its larger body to physically pin Rainbow to its chest, gripping her head in a taloned hand to force her to look at what they were about to do to Flutters.
Luna regarded this impassively before turning her head to look at the supremely smug creature that appeared to be in command. “Wrong lesson, beast.”
The world disappeared in a howling maelstrom of divine wrath.
It was impossible to determine exactly what was happening beyond the pulsations of reality itself, as wave after wave of earthshaking magical workings radiated from the goddess of the moon and the night sky. Determining exactly what Luna had done, would do, and was even now doing was simply impossible; every time she thought she had it nailed down, another working would knock her off her feet and she’d lose track. All that she could be sure of, however, was that Luna was singlehoofedly wiping away every tiny vestige of Void as far as the eyes could see… and yet, Spite was perfectly intact. It had been her experience that every time an entity of world-making or world-breaking power totally lost themselves to their emotions, their power slaughtered indiscriminately, directed by their unconscious thoughts. Then again, none of those entities had the focus and discipline to craft very deadly and precise magical workings at whim, and wield those workings with a surgeon’s deftness; Luna’s swords and wires were quick, surgically precise, and seemed to come to her with no more effort than it would take to breath. Although she’d never seen Twilight Sparkle unleash her full power, Spite had a suspicion that Celestia’s daughter had the same instinctive control that her aunt did… which, as Spite thought about it while the maelstrom whirled around her, seemed very unusual. Children, after all, tended to take after their parents but Twilight appeared to take after her aunt.
She was prevented from considering this line of thought any further by the fading of the magical storm and she dared to open her eyes again, half-wondering if the full wrath of Princess Luna had made a glassy crater of the sand she stood on. The first thing she noticed was that the sun was blazing away cheerfully above them; the second was that two griffins, one male and the other female, lay sprawled in the sand out cold but seeming otherwise in good health. Thirdly, she saw no sign of the twisted version of Gilda; keeping in character with the default cowardice of Void creatures, she had no doubt fled just ahead of Luna’s wrath. None of this compared to Luna herself. Cutting loose with her full power had transformed the moon princess beyond even the armor-clad field general she was when she was wielding her swords and for the first time, Spite could fully appreciate the family resemblance between her and Celestia.
The burnished silver but somewhat utilitarian crown she usually wore had been transformed into a light thing that looked to be woven out of silver spider’s silk and adorned with amethysts, sapphires, and polished onyx stones. Full moonlight armor had been replaced with a simple breastplate emblazoned with Luna’s cutie mark and jeweled in the same manner as her crown. To top it all off, Luna had grown to be long-limbed and slender like her sister, but with an ethereal beauty that was quite different from Celestia’s regal splender but somehow more lovely, the effect added to by her starry mane and tail that seemed to drift around her like a gentle evening breeze was stirring it. Her eyes, hard and predatory as a field general, blazed with a fierce blue flame that actually seemed to radiate from her eyes, as if the eyes themselves had caught fire.
But as the storm of spells wound down, the glorious visage of a wrathful goddess drifted away until Luna was once again the small, lovely pony she normally appeared to be. An utterly exhausted pony that would have collapsed in place if Spite hadn’t been there to catch her and gently lower her to the ground.
“Are you alright, Luna?” She asked with concern.
“We are… I am fine, Spite,” the alicorn assured her. “What of Rainbow and Fluttershy? Were they… did that thing’s minions manage to harm Fluttershy?”
“I’m fine, Your Highness,” Fluttershy’s small voice assured her. “Rainbow, though…”
It was then that Spite saw the rainbow-maned mare laying on the ground, looking dead but for her lack of visible injury and the tiny expansion and compression of her sides. Everything, from the way her wings were haphazardly laying to the defeated slump of her entire body broadcasted a mare teetering on the edge of total despair.
“Rainbow, are you…”
“No.” Rainbow’s voice was as dead as her posture, so completely devoid of any life that Spite felt herself cringe at it. “I just watched a thing walking around in my dead friend’s skin, speaking with her voice, sneering at me with her mannerisms and word choice, ordering her minions to murder my only other childhood friend and make me watch.” Rainbow lifted her head just enough to turn it so Spite could see the hurt-beyond-pain radiating from those jewel-like irises. “I buried her. I… I cried for her, been crying for her for months now. I still hurt whenever someone even accidentally mentions her or talks like she did. I’ve been hurting, I’ve been missing her, I’ve been wanting so badly to just see her again. But this? Like this? Watching my best friend in the world order the murder of a friend, order her thugs to make me watch helplessly as Fluttershy… d… d… died slowly just out of my reach?”
“I want her back but not like this! I don’t fucking want her back like this!” And Rainbow put her head back down and began sobbing softly, Fluttershy walking over and very gently laying a wing over her and laying against her side, not saying anything, just being there and radiating support and kindness to her suffering friend.
Spite watched this before looking over at Luna. “You no doubt realize this already, your Majesty, but there is a damn good reason we call these cowardly, sadistic, lickspittles ‘evils’,” she said quietly. “I generally feel satisfied when I put these things through but this time? I think this time, I’m going to enjoy it.”