At some point in their lives, all ponies learn that it’s usually best to look on the bright side of life. The gold-coated pegasus gliding lazily over the Everfree Forest hadn’t yet reached that point, partially because she’d never had what you’d call a “positive attitude”, but mostly because she’d never really ever been “alive” to begin with. In light of the day’s events, though, she thought she might give it a try. So far, it wasn’t too bad.
Her first few hours back in corporeal form hadn’t been perfect by any means, but when she thought about it, they had definitely had their perks. The sky was dark and thick with clouds, the air crackled with the metallic scent of an oncoming storm, and all things considered, she was going to make it to the Fortress of the Four in pretty good time.
And of course, she couldn’t leave out the detour she’d had to make this go-around, a quick visit to a caravan of earth pony settlers shipping out from who knew where towards who cared what. She had a good reason for stopping by, too. One of the younger ones had seen her flying overhead, and it seemed unprofessional just to leave them be. What was the little brat’s name, again? Somepony had screamed it during her impromptu social call. Fun Bash? Corn Mash?
Thunderflash. That was it. Well, by this point Thunder Ash was probably a better name. Geez, that forest had burned good. She hadn’t had so much fun setting something on fire since… well, since the last time she’d set something on fire. Guess you don’t realize how much you miss things unless you go a few thousand years without them, she’d thought once or twice that day.
But what with how downright perky she was feeling, the time she’d lost barely even registered in her mind. It didn’t matter how long she’d been gone. She was back now, baby, along with one of her oldest and deadliest allies, who seemed to be feeling a bit moody today if his chosen form—an undulating cloud of black smoke that had no distinguishing features and yet still managed to look angry—was anything to go by. For some reason, he’d been following her around ever since they’d found themselves back in Terra surrounded by a scorched expanse of shattered rock, the acidic scent of ozone still fading away from the lightning bolt that had delivered them back into the mortal plane.
Come to think of it, though, that was completely normal for him. The most rage-filled, earth-shattering, absurdly powerful killing machine the universe had ever known, and yet when it came to figuring out where to unleash his fury, he was like a little lost puppy: always looking for somepony to point him in the right direction. In retrospect, there were worse fates than having the embodiment of the term “unholy wrath” at your every beck and call.
As it turned out, though, both of them were heeding the same order at the moment: an instinctual pressure in their guts—or what passed for them now, anyway—pulling them towards the apex of the incantation that had dragged them back into the realm of the living. Hopefully, the dork who’d summoned them all this time would know a bit more about what he was doing. The last one had skipped a few steps and was already spread across several of the fortress’s walls by the time she had reached him. Cloudy over here said he was like that when he got there too. She had never forgiven him for not saving her a couple bites.
Predictably, the only member of their group waiting outside the Fortress when she and Cloudy arrived was Big Brother. He hated being called that, so she made a point of calling him nothing else. She didn’t care how many millions of years went by; watching his head spin off into the stratosphere would never stop being hilarious.
“You’re late,” he grumbled as she came in for a hard but still mostly controlled landing, folding her wings delicately along her back and hopping out of the deep fissure she’d just smashed open inside the main castle’s front steps. He had fallen back on his default form this go-around: reddish-maroon coat, good-sized unicorn horn, flowing bronze mane that looked about as oily as the black marble beneath his hooves, and a cutie mark of an opened eye that matched his own dull brown ones perfectly. She, on the other hoof, preferred a lighter, more mobile build, as opposed to Cloudy, who tended to not care who or what looked at him as long as they ended their encounter deader than they started.
“Got chested up by a few diggers out in the boonies,” she explained, shaking the rubble out of her mane and flashing him a distinctly red-tinged grin. “You know how it is, Big Brother.”
“Unfortunately, I do,” he cut back with acid in his voice. His eyes and his cutie mark burned like rubies now. “And I’m not your brother.”
“Technically, we’re all related if you look at it sideways. So yeah, you kinda are.”
Big Brother sighed and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. When he opened them again a moment ago, their irises had dried out into a misty gray color. “Get inside,” he continued, his attention now directed towards the disgruntled puff next to her. “And at least try to look normal for once.”
As Big Brother turned to leave, Cloudy grew a wispy set of legs and contorted himself into a roughly pony-like shape, which eventually solidified into an actual pony with a grey coat, unkempt black mane, and green-tinted eyes with irises that glowed and shimmered like the embers of a dormant fire. The horn atop his head glimmered red and orange as well, and streaks of wispy purple smoke seeped out of the corners of his eyes and floated back past his ears. "Normal", it seemed, held a slightly different meaning for this particular harbringer of death.
“Aw, can’t you let him express himself, Big Bro?” his pegasus partner cooed in a manner that was sure to infuriate everypony within earshot. “He’s so adorable when he’s just a bitty wittle waincwoud. And hey, if he goes gonzo again, all we gotta do is hope for a good breeze.”
The pony formerly known as Cloudy grew to nearly twice his previous size in an instant, his mane whipping around in a nonexistent gale. “Oh, cool it, Sparky,” she added in a deadpan a moment later. “No one’s impressed.”
Now Not-So-Cloudy was three times as big, a feat that his tormentor reacted to with a yawn and a cock-eyed smirk. A glare from Big Brother quickly brought both of them back down to earth, though, and with varying degrees of reluctance they both followed him into the cavernous main hall of the Fortress of the Four.
Even in the nearly complete darkness inside the foyer, four other diversely-sized equine shapes were still visible in various parts of the room. So everypony else had decided to show up early too. Fine by her. If time had ever held any real weight to her, it would’ve been the kind of weight that could be easily ignored until she felt it was time for her to start bothering to carry it.
“Even Acedia beat you here this time,” Big Brother said with a smirk, using the archaic name for his fellow Vice like he was prone to do way too often. “Those diggers from the boonies must’ve had quite the chests on them.”
“Hey, Big Brother, you see this?” the pegasus replied, forcing a lethargic expression onto her face without much difficulty. “This is me giving a—”
“Where is he?”
Both she and Big Brother turned towards the third member of their party, the one who hadn’t uttered anything more complex than a snarl the entire day. “Where is he?” the colossal approximation of a stallion said again, his eyes narrowed into beady red slits. Nobody asked who he was talking about; there was only one pony he could be talking about, and he was the only reason they were all here in the first place.
“Summoner?” Big Brother called out. His voice reverberated twice inside the massive hall, and neither time was it accompanied by any kind of response. And as confident and unflappable as they both usually were, the pegasus couldn’t help but share a curious glance with him. Every past Summoner had been pretty close to insufferable for how swelled their heads were over their magical prowess. The last thing any of them would’ve wanted to do was hide from the greatest evidence of their might ever seen by ponykind. So where in Hades was this one?
“If the pony or beast who summoned us is here now, I bid you come forward!” Big Brother shouted. This time, his voice was loud enough to echo three times, and when it made its third trip back past his ears, a disembodied chuckle followed closely behind.
“Bid me, you say?” a deep, nasal, and thoroughly amused voice asked. As the seven ponies visible in the room looked around fruitlessly for the eighth, the Summoner laughed again, his outburst sounding more a cackle now. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you supposed to be under my command?”
Ah, now that was more like the Summoners they all knew and loathed. And that was more like Big Brother to be the only one of them all who still let their pretentiousness get under his skin. “Our only desire is to serve you, Summoner,” he answered in an undertone.
The Summoner snorted again. His voice sounded closer now. “Oh, you’re just saying that to get on my good side, you tease...”
Then again, maybe Big Brother was smarter than he let on. “Enough with the semantics! Show yourself!” the pegasus shouted, stepping up to stand defiantly by Big Brother’s side. Only a couple feet of space separated the two of them, and she paid the gap no mind until, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the air inside it begin to shimmer. Before she could so much as turn her head, the shimmer condensed into a tiny bubble, which promptly exploded into a cloud of purple smoke with a deafening pop. Within moments, the smoke swirled back into a ball and disappeared, leaving behind a chocolate-brown unicorn with a stubby black mane and a bushy goatee.
“A fair request, my mercurial little hellspawn,” he loudly proclaimed, leaning hard up against her as if they were just the absolute best of friends. The second she started winding up to sock him in the jaw he vanished again, twin bangs and smoke puffs announcing his transferral from her side to about an inch in front of her nose.
“And one I’m all too happy to oblige,” he added. He spent a moment considering her green-eyed, livid gaze, then cocked his brow and flashed her the best manure-eating grin she’d ever seen on a mortal’s mug.
“You must be Greed,” he said. “Word on the street is you’re just irresistible.”
“Is that so?” she intoned back.
The Summoner pursed his lips and gave a knowing nod, then tilted his head to the side to look behind her. “And I take it the big ol’ ray of sunshine melting a hole in my parlor floor back here is Wrath. Love what you’ve done with your mane. Really brings out the uncontrollable murderous rage in your complexion.”
As Wrath scuffed at the floor and snorted, the Summoner turned to Big Brother. “Pride, of course, a personal favorite of mine. And then if I’m not mistaken, that leaves Lust, Envy, Gluttony and...”
He trailed off, and the whole group turned towards the last pony in the row. Every one of them had complete control over their physical constitutions, and their preferred forms usually reflected their namesakes. Lust was deep maroon, long-horned, and all curves and well-toned muscle; Envy was predictably a nauseating shade of green; and Gluttony was the rough size, shape, and consistency of a four-foot tall jelly donut. And then there was Sloth, the one the Summoner was looking at now, whose standard form was that of a teensy little earth filly with a bubble-gum pink mane that hung down to a luxuriously long length over a midnight-blue coat. The Summoner himself perhaps said it best after a moment’s pause:
“Well, to each their own.”
Now the Summoner made his way up onto the central dias at the rear of the hall, though this time he traveled at a more natural trot. Once he arrived, he wheeled himself around and faced the gathered crowd in front of him, and Greed couldn’t resist the urge to roll her eyes. Right on schedule: the Summoner Monologue.
“And there we are,” he began. “Seven fearsome fiends of old. The infamous Seven Deadly Vices, restored to glory for the first time in centuries. In the thousands of years since this world first belched out life, you seven were the greatest terror that ever stalked it. Once, ponykind trembled in fear of your might. Once, they lived for you, worshipped you, hopelessly toiled away in pursuit of whatever your metaphorically black hearts desired.”
He paused, and the gaze that he swept over his summoned subjects took on a disapproving air. “Clearly, you’ve fallen on some hard times.”
Unsurprisingly, neither Pride nor Wrath took that last remark on the chin. “You seem quite confident in your knowledge of our history,” the former of the two grumbled.
“Well, excuse me for doing my homework,” the Summoner replied. Greed couldn’t tell whether he sounded frustrated or offended. “It’s not every day you get complete, unquestioning control over six avatars of pure evil and one giant black smoldering, uh...”
The Summoner trailed off and shook his head, his hoof still hovering in mid-gesture and pointed in the general direction of Wrath. “I’m sorry, it’s driving me crazy. Are you a mare or a stallion? Actually, do you guys even have genders, or is it just kind of an androgynous thing?”
Pride grit his teeth, but said nothing. That was Pride for you, all right: he’d preen himself and spit acid for a while, and probably hold a permanent grudge against the Summoner to boot, but he’d never go so far as to attack his enemies himself. That responsibility was left to guys like Wrath, whose first and only reaction to everything was “Kill it” or, if that didn’t work, “Kill it harder.”
Judging by his reaction here, he seemed to have skipped straight to the second plan: with an ear-splitting roar, he exploded up from the ground in a maelstrom of ash and fire, giant blobs of lava spraying the walls and sizzling against the now thoroughly abused stone. The Summoner’s only response was to blink slowly and thread his upper lip between his teeth, which only made the whole spectacle that much better for Greed. There had many a Summoner in the last few millennia, and all of them tended to have this funny little belief that the physical embodiments of disharmony and chaos would just line up in front of them like good little soldiers, ready to follow their every command without so much as a daydream of resisting.
Problem was, they never seemed to read the fine print in the spell tomes: the Seven were obligated to obey their Summoner, but only so long as he gave them a direct order. And if there was one thing Greed loved to find, it was loopholes like that. So instead of jumping to the Summoner’s aid, she just sat back and watched as Wrath bellowed again and bore down on the unsuspecting mortal below. She’d been too late to the party to watch this last time they’d popped up on Earth, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it now. This moron wouldn’t even have time to scream before Wrath ripped him into bite-sized chunks.
Except Wrath didn’t rip him into bite-sized chunks. In fact, Wrath never even touched the Summoner at all. His jagged, bared teeth were only inches from the mortal’s skull when they crashed into something strong enough not just to repel him, but to stop him dead in his tracks and send the rest of his non-corporeal form piling up behind him, pouring over the invisible barrier surrounding the noticeably unshredded Summoner. A chorus of gasps rang out from the other six Vices, and after waiting a moment for Wrath’s eyes to refocus, he opened his mouth to speak.
“Okay,” he said with an understanding nod. “Guess that’s a touchy subject.”
• • •
Leo had never been a big fan of drinking. She wasn’t a prude or anything; she totally would drink if everybody else was, and probably could handle it pretty well if she did. It was the drinks themselves she didn’t like: all those bubbles crackling in her throat and floating around in her stomach like she was a balloon ready to pop. Every sip from the gleaming glass bottle in front of her made her eyes water and her lips pinch together, but she kept taking more and more anyway. If all the Hunters were knocking back shots like tenpins, they couldn’t really be that bad.
“So okay, you... y-you remember this, right, Aries?” Scorpio shouted, half because she tended to be a bit exuberant when she was drunk, and half just to make herself heard over the thunderous noise around her. Although the Great Hall in Oasis was big enough for five hundred ponies, the twelves various gods and goddesses crowded around its one and only table now felt more than big enough to fill the room. They’d all piled inside earlier as one giddy mass, but soon enough they’d instinctively separated themselves out into their normal positioning around the table.
Virgo and Libra sat at either end, the former buried in a deep discussion of governmental policy with a mostly silent Taurus, and the latter trying not to snort cider out of her nose as Gemini, Capricorn, and Pisces elaborately mimed an encounter they’d had with a particularly depressed weeping willow that morning. Scorpio sat on Virgo’s other side across from Taurus, but she was far too busy swapping old war stories with Aries and drinking away her sorrows at losing her bet with him to care about whatever their leader was saying.
The other winner in their wager had tossed out a good-natured joke at Scorpio's expense every now and then, but for the most part Sagittarius seemed content to just stew in his own thoughts between Taurus and Aquarius, his hoof lazily hooked around a bottle of the Cheerywine Scorpio'd spent the first hour of the meal wistfully staring at. Leo herself, meanwhile, sat across from Aquarius, every so often glancing at Cancer off to her right but mostly keeping her attention locked in on Aries, who at the moment was pointing a wobbly glare at Scorpio while balancing a heavy wooden flagon in the crook of his ankle.
“I remember you abandoning me to handle fifteen lich lords by myself because you had to take a leak,” he said, the slur in his words evidence that he had very much appreciated Sage’s offer to share his stock with him in honor of their victory.
Scorpio waved him off with an uncoordinated gesture that would’ve sent Virgo’s plate flying had she not moved it just out of reach thirty seconds before. “Buck off, that’s not important.”
“The not-important part’s that you freakin’ left me in a war zone by myself?”
“I came back!” Sagittarius cracked a grin, and Scorpio raised her voice again over Aries’ protests. “Yes, I did, I came back, and that’s what you gotta remember, right?”
Aries grunted his disagreement and raised his glass, tapping it against his forehead right before downing its contents with a grimace. As his cup clunked back on the table, Leo wrapped her lips around her own bottle and tilted it up. By sheer force of will, she managed not to choke and gulped down the flood of liquid burning on her tongue.
“So the rest of the team’s stuck cleaning up behind us, and I’m down to my last Cherry Bomb,” Scorpio went on, referring to the explosives Aquarius had built them for that battle whose names were a bit of a misnomer in light of their strength. “And thanks to Ari being clever enough to get himself surrounded in the middle of a twenty-yard deep valley, I’m a bit low on options. So I, being of sound body and—ahem—incredibly sound mind, came up with a plan.”
“Right, yeah, I remember this part too,” Aries muttered. “Think I still have the scars from this part, actually.”
Scorpio, being apparently of not-so-sound hearing, ignored him. “I go full-armored, dive over the edge and land right on the lead one’s back.” She reached out and slapped over a cup she’d emptied a few minutes earlier. “Boom! He’s down. Two on either side—” She pointed her hoof at her neck, then jerked it to the side as if she were slicing at it with a blade. “—history. Now the rest of them see me. I back myself up, take down a couple but leave the rest thinking they’ve got me cornered, and then...”
The table shuddered as Scorpio’s coat flushed black and morphed into overlapping plates of rock-hard armor. Now even Libra was paying attention, though the look on her face was far from impressed. “I light the fuse,” she finished with a grin that looked positively malicious on her now unrecognizable face. “Game over. Lich parts everywhere.”
“Along with some Ari parts,” Aries commented into his echoing cup, “but I digress.”
“You were fifteen feet away!”
“From a bomb with a range of twenty.”
“Minor detail,” Scorpio said with another slightly more contained wave.
“Yeah, well, stop by my room later,” Aries shot back. “See how minor you think my detail is then.”
Taurus jerked in his seat as Scorpio choked on her drink and sprayed mead all over him, flicking the droplets left on her hooves back at Aries as the rest of the table whooped and laughed—Leo loudest of all. The next sip she took from her mug barely fit in her mouth, and she slipped into a coughing fit that wouldn’t let up even after the rest of the group had quieted down again.
“You all right there, Leo?” Aries asked her. Her eyes blurry and her throat searing in pain, Leo nodded as fast as she could.
“Yep,” she croaked. “You’re just funny and, uh... n-not minor.”
Scorpio snorted again, Aries cracked a grin, and at least ninety-five percent of Leo’s body went numb. “Appreciate the sentiment,” he said, lifting his mug to his lips again before narrowing his eyes into a scowl. “Aw, son of a...”
“You dry too?” Scorpio asked, her empty cup overturned on the table and her tone now similarly glum.
“Yeah,” Aries replied. Now he turned towards Capricorn, the Zodiac’s resident gardening expert and full-time chef. “Hey, Cap, is the cellar still stocked?”
“Uh... should be,” she replied, taking a moment to dislodge her mind from the conversation she’d been having before.
“Awesome. So, uh, hate to be a bother or anything, but you think you could pop down there real quick and grab us another bot—”
“I got it!”
The whole table turned to look at Leo, whose until now hadn’t quite realized how loudly she had just shouted her offer. “I mean, y’know,” she added, shaking off their curious stares with a casual glance down at the edge of her forehoof. “If no one else wants to.”
Out of the corner of her lowered eyes, she could Scorpio and Aries both wearing twin knowing smirks, and the intoxicating warmth fizzing in her stomach began to flush into her face. Thankfully, Virgo stepped in before too long to deflect some of the heat.
“Think I’ll go with her,” she said. “Stretch my legs a bit.”
“And then try to go shot for shot with us?” Aries added, his voice a mix of standard ribbing and honest hopefulness. Virgo smiled, and shot him down with an air of practiced efficiency.
“Some of us have better uses for our weapons,” she said. Without so much as flinching at the second round of hooting and hollering that spread across the table, she neatly folded her napkin over her spotless plate and beckoned for Leo to follow her, the noise in the Hall cutting out the instant they rounded the corner into the hallway outside.
“Thanks for the help,” Leo murmured once they were out of Aries’ earshot.
“You’re not the only one in there who needed it,” Virgo answered, but aside from a shrug and a gentle smile, Leo got nothing else out of her. After wasting a few moments trying to puzzle out what she’d meant, she gave up with a shrug of her own and followed Virgo down the darkened cellar stairs.
She had more important things to think about. She couldn’t depend on Virgo to bail her out next time. Next time she had Aries’ attention like that, she couldn’t fumble it away like a nervous little mortal girl. She was one of the Zodiac, just as much as he was. She had to be calm. Collected. Confident.
And cool. She absolutely, positively had to be cool.
• • •
Swathed in flames and choking black smog, Wrath barked with fury and charged at the Summoner’s shield again, but to no avail. While he occupied the attention of the rest of the hall’s occupants, Greed took a moment to push her jaw back up and gather her thoughts. With the right magical spell, of course, there was always a more foolproof way to shield yourself from physical and arcane attacks, but there was only one spell powerful enough to do it against the unbridled power of a ticked-off Vice. This guy had done his homework.
And even now, he didn’t so much as flinch as Wrath continued to beat himself stupid against the intangible barricade. It was as if he had been prepared for this, as if he had known exactly how each and every one of them would react to his presence. The other Summoners had been simple. This Summoner was something else.
It took Wrath a full minute before he pulled back and gave up, reduced by the Summoner’s ancient protective magic to nothing more than a furious glare peering out from inside a roiling black cloud. A few moments later, he collected himself back into equine form and trod forward to where he had met resistance before. He did no better at reaching the Summoner like that than he had with the full brunt of his power; his tentatively raised forehoof moved freely through the air until it was about a foot from the Summoner’s nose, at which point it bounced off the still indiscernible barrier between them with an audible clunk. He put his hoof down, and glared again.
“Are you quite finished?” the Summoner asked.
Wrath drew in a long, heavy breath through his nose, but it came out as a snort rather than a bellow. The big beast lumbered over to the side of the room to sulk, and the Summoner cleared his throat.
“Well, then,” he said, his tone so cheerful and innocent that it was easy to believe that his near-death experience had already slipped his mind. “Now that we’re all acquainted, let’s get down to business, shall we? I presume you’re all aware of at least how you’re here: namely, I completed the ancient ritual, called you forth from the cursed ground you infected, sold my soul for eternal power and glory...”
The Summoner’s gaze drifted off the ceiling, and he waved himself along with his hoof. “Yadda yadda yadda, and so on and so forth. Point is, I’m in charge here, so let’s go ahead and lay down a few ground rules before we...”
His gaze shifted over to Wrath again, just long enough to catch the tail end of a simmering leer. “... have any more disagreements.”
Pride caught Wrath’s attention and subtly shook his head, and Greed saw no reason to argue the point. The others had certainly been caught off guard, and she couldn’t really deny that she had been too. But more than being scared or confused, she was curious. Who was this mortal? And exactly how had he become so powerful without the Zodiac taking notice?
Once he saw there was no dissent amongst the Vices, the Summoner continued. “First things first, that whole ‘great and powerful Summoner’ schtick? Not really my style. Unfortunately, the name bequeathed upon me at birth isn’t really my style either, so for the time being, just ‘Master’ will do fine.” He paused, looking over at Wrath once again with a much more visible glint in his eye this time. “So long as nopony’s too put out by the idea.”
Wrath snorted again, only to be restrained—barely—by a look from Pride once again. Greed, on the other side, was beginning to feel a smile curling on her face. Not only did this Summoner have power, but he liked to abuse it too. She could really see them getting along well someday.
“Secondly,” he went on as Wrath heaved for breath nearby, “and this is a kind of a long shot, but what the hay: none of you happen to know a really good parsley soup recipe, do you?”
No one answered, and Greed’s grin grew. “Perfect, because that brings me nicely into my third and final point: I’m gonna need a housekeeping crew. Luckily for you, I’ve got better things for you folks to do than run around beating rugs and changing my sheets, so my first official decree as your official lord and master is as follows.”
The Summoner—or Master now, Greed supposed—stepped down off the dias and out into the middle of the room. “There’s a little settlement of nomads about fifteen miles due...”
He spun around in a circle with his hoof outstretched, and stopped once he was pointing to a spot about two-thirds of the way down the left-side wall. “That way. I want you to pay them a visit—show some excessive force, enjoy yourselves for a bit—then come back with about, oh, let’s say ten or twelve prisoners. Any race is fine as long as there’s a couple unicorns in the bunch, and I’d prefer most of their limbs be functional, but I can work around it if things get dicey. Oh, and if any of them happens to have a penchant for the piano, that’d be just perfetto.”
By now, Greed was about ready to walk through one of the lava patches Wrath had scattered around for this beautifully sociopathic Summoner, but Pride, as always, had to be a buzzkill. “That’s it?” he said slowly, either because he wanted to make sure Master could comprehend the words, or because he himself couldn't.
“I can write it down if you want,” Master replied.
Pride squeezed his head and gave another little shake of his head. “That’s all you want us to do?”
“Well, right now, yes. I spent the whole night walking out here, I’m starving and, to be fair, I suppose I can’t imagine an immortal incarnation of mortal immorality would have any reason to know how to cook.”
Now Pride finally grew a pair and put on a glare to rival Wrath’s. “You wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to summon us just for bits and giggles.”
The corner of Master’s mouth twitched up in time with his eyebrow. “That’s an interesting theory.”
A faint murmur wafted up from the other Vices in the back, most of the sound echoing in the cavernous space inside Pride’s slackjawed expression. Master waited for a while for Pride to grace him with a response, but soon lost his patience and filled the gap in the conversation himself.
“If you really must know, yes, I have a plan beyond breakfast tomorrow morning, and yes, it involves you all,” he said. “What you don’t need to know right now is what exactly that plan entails. All you need to worry about is precisely what I ask you to do each day.”
The next voice to pop up certainly wasn’t Pride’s. It was too loud, too strong, too thick with the kinds of things that made you want to buck an overbearing boss or schoolyard bully in the teeth. “Why don’t you tell us now?” Wrath growled.
“Because I trust you all about as far as I can throw you,” Master replied. “And you, my friend, look a bit on the heavy side.”
Wrath attacked so fast Greed almost missed it when she blinked in surprise. Sparks and droplets of molten rock flew all the way to the ceiling as the Vice threw every last bit of energy he had at breaking through Master’s magical shield, but no matter how hard he smashed into it or how loud he screamed, though, the barrier still held. In fact, it even seemed to harden a little bit; the last impact shook the very foundations of the Fortress, and left Wrath disoriented and gasping for air.
“Does he always do that, or is it just me?” Master asked the rest of the Vices, his gaze lingering mainly on Greed. She bit her lip hard and shrugged, but couldn’t regain her composure fast enough to beat Pride in being the first to speak up.
“If you don’t trust us, why should we trust you?” he asked.
“Three reasons,” Master said. “One, because of my naturally sunny disposition. Two, because you’re after limitless power and unquestioning subservience just as much as I am. And three...”
The cold, black look that radiated out from Master’s eyes and washed over the entire hall bore all the markings of a perfected art form, one that had been honed to a razor-sharp point through many other instances of terrifying other mortals into submission. It didn’t do much to set Greed quaking in her boots, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t respect another expert in the craft.
“Because as dictated by the ancient rites that facilitated your return to this homely little spectral plane I call reality, you don’t have any other choice,” he finished. He let the silence hold for exactly three seconds, then broke it with a jaunty sigh and disarming grin.
“And with that, I bid you all goodnight,” he said. “Second door on the left down the hall if you need anything.”
It might have seemed out of character for Pride not to say a word as Master swiveled on his back hooves and made for the hallway branching off from the left side of the back wall, but Greed knew better than to settle for thinking that. That look in his eyes was anything but defeated; if she knew her so-called Big Brother a tenth as well as she was sure she did, a parting shot or two couldn’t be far off. Sure enough, just as Master’s forehooves crossed the threshold of the corridor, Pride called after him, his tone calculated to be casual in the most threatening way possible.
“What about the Zodiac?”
• • •
The cellar was cramped and nearly pitch-black inside, the outlines of dusty old crates and forgotten relics of wars long past just barely visible in the thin light seeping down from the top of the stairs. The Zodiac’s preferred choice of mead—an ancient recipe of Capricorn’s made with rich, tangy honey from Pisces’s beehives—would be in one of the storage racks carved into the wall nearby, each one kept deliciously cold by the bone-chilling mountaintop rocks the shelves were carved into. Now all they needed to do was find an unopened bottle, a task that was made a good deal more difficult by the fact that neither Leo nor Virgo could see two inches in front of their nose.
“Leo, dear?” Virgo asked from somewhere off to the right. “You think you could give us a light?”
Leo nodded, only to realize a few moments later that there was no way Virgo could’ve seen her do that. “Got it,” she said, already fumbling towards the wall for the torch she knew would be bolted there. A few more moments passed in an increasingly awkward silence, and then Leo realized something else.
“Oh...” she mumbled, her face flushing with heat. “Right.”
Her cheeks growing even warmer after hearing Virgo let out a polite, satisfied cough, Leo closed her eyes—for whatever difference that made—and concentrated all of her energy into a tiny speck of light in the center of her stomach. The more she focused her strength on that little speck, the more it grew, until after a few seconds it had formed itself into a ball that kept on expanding right on out of her stomach and into her chest and legs and the tips of her ears.
She parted her lips and slowly let out the breath she’d been holding in, and freed from the confines of the ball trapped inside her guts, her pent-up energy followed the escaping air all the way out to the farthest corners of the room. By the time she breathed in again, the cellar was flooded with brilliant white light, all of it emanating from Leo’s gleaming coat and mane. She flashed Virgo a cheesy grin, and the elder pony couldn’t help but shield her eyes. She’d forgotten her teeth usually glowed as well.
“Sorry,” Leo muttered, pressing her lips tightly together as she shuffled off to find the rack where the mead was stored and told herself that she’d just imagined Virgo rolling her eyes. Even though she generally liked Virgo, and the austere-looking leader of the Hunters generally seemed to like her, it didn’t seem fair for her to be so dismissive. It wasn’t like it was really Leo’s fault she’d forgotten about her special power. She used to practice with it all the time, before the rest of the group decided they’d all be better off if Leo didn’t stay up half the night lighting up the whole mountain like a Solstice Day float.
Leo rounded the corner with her mind still busy remembering Scorpio’s boot flying at her head at four in the morning, and the rusty cuirass that soon clanged off her forehoof brought her painfully back to reality. You know, it didn’t just seem unfair; it was totally unfair. How was she ever supposed to get stronger if she couldn’t practice? This couldn’t possibly be the only thing she was capable of. Everypony in the Zodiac had some awesomely deadly special talent, even the other Gatherers. Hay, even Capricorn could enslave an entire forest to tangle up monsters in vines and stab them in the eyes with foot-long thorns, and all she ever used it for was hedge-trimming!
A sliver of golden glass glimmered in the corner of her eye, and she doubled back a few steps to stop in front of the mead rack she had nearly walked right by. They couldn’t make her give up that easily. With a little bit practice and a bit of luck, she had to be able to make them understand. After all, there must have been sometime when everypony in the Zodiac had to figure out what their power was. Maybe Aries used to just shuffle his hooves on the carpet and zap ponies when they weren’t looking. Maybe Scorpio used to morph into a polka-dotted ladybug. There was potential awesomeness lurking inside her that was just begging to be unleashed. And as soon as she figured out what it was, the scumballs and scary stuff of the world had better watch their backs.
• • •
Master passed over the threshold of the hallway and walked out of sight without breaking stride. “What about them?” he called back a second Greed was convinced he had left for good.
The corner of Pride’s lips twitched. She knew that look too: the one he got whenever he was sure the balance of power was beginning to tip his way again. “You do know about the Zodiac, don’t you?”
Master’s head poked out from behind the corner. “Rings a bell.”
Now the other corner of Pride’s mouth twitched, and then slowly rose along with its opposite to form a simpering smirk. “Well, well,” he crooned. “Seems you didn’t quite study as hard as you thought.”
Master reached out with two legs and sidestepped all the way back out into view, a weary expression making his eyes and brow droop. “If you’re truly so concerned about them, it seems you’re right,” he said. Pride’s lips parted and stayed that way as he tried to interpret his Summoner’s response, and in that extra moment of confusion, Master’s eyebrows shot back up. “I’m listening.”
Pride didn’t need any spare time to figure out the sentiment behind that remark. His gaze eyes narrowed with contempt, he explained himself with words spoken in a tone just barely above a hiss. “The Zodiac are the mortal world’s slobbering watchdogs,” he said. “They’re pretentious, empty-headed, bleeding-heart hypocrites with a lust for power and uncompromising prejudice against anything that so much as looks at them funny. The mortals worship them, let them meddle with their minds and make all their decisions for them. They pretend to be benevolent, but the peasants are just as scared of them as they should be of us.”
Master seemed, in a word, unperturbed. “Are you scared of them?”
Pride scoffed. “Of course not.”
“Good, so there’s no problem.”
For the second time in as many minutes, Pride was at a loss for words. It wasn’t until Master took his leave and headed for bed again that he finally managed to sputter out a response. “If you keep acting like they won’t sniff you out like a rotten apple before the night’s through, there sure as Hades will be!”
Master stopped in the hall threshold again, an exasperated sigh his only form of reply. “They outnumber us almost two to one, and can nearly match our strength while fully mobilized,” Pride went on, with a little more composure now that he saw he had Master’s begrudging attention. “We won’t have a problem with that, but you...”
“... will be double-checking the steps in the next phase in my plan, sipping on a nice aged Merlot and debating the pros and cons of ordering you into a frilly yellow sundress,” Master finished, without missing a beat or turning around to look at Pride. “Yank the plank out of your flank and relax. I’ve got it covered.”
That made three times now, and boy was this one a charm to watch. “You’re not going to do anything to stop them,” Pride said blankly.
“Not at the moment,” Master confirmed.
“Even though their leaders can see and sense everything that happens anywhere on the continent at any time?”
Finally, Master turned around, but only to shoot Pride a patronizing smile. “Hey, how ‘bout that? You did your homework too!”
“We need to fight,” Wrath interrupted before Pride could put forth a much more pretentious version of the same argument. “We need to crush them.”
“We need to settle down before we forgot our place in this little study group here,” Master argued. A little sliver of ice had snuck into his words again. “I am going to say this exactly two more times: I have it covered.”
“So you say,” Pride said dismissively, shaking his head and turning away in disgust. “So all the ponies who summon us say. You may hide your plan from us, but you can’t hide it from them. They’ll know. They’ll rip open the fabric of space and time, burrow under it like the spineless parasites they are, and simply wait for you to walk into their trap. We’ve seen better mortals than you laid to waste by less than half their order, so what makes you so sure you know better than them? Better than us? How do you know they aren’t on their way here right now?”
• • •
Bolstered by her newfound courage, Leo grabbed the biggest bottle of mead she could find off the rack, and trotted back over to Virgo while visions of glowy-light-power explosions danced in her head. Maybe midnight flash capacity tests in the Oasis courtyard weren’t such a good idea, but what if she just came down here in the cellar? It might be dark enough for a warm-up, just to get her glowy bits sufficiently... glowy. Would calling them “glowy muscles” be too much of a stretch?
Heh. Muscles. Stretch.
Anyway, after she was done in here, there might be a spot down in the valley where the light wouldn’t reach the mountaintop. She’d have to ask Virgo about it. No, on second thought, she wouldn’t ask anybody. A Hunter would make her own decisions, tread her own path, ask for forgiveness later and permission never. Or something like that, at least.
“Ha gut ih!” she shouted ahead to Virgo. Once she laid the bottle down on top of a nearby box and brushed the dust off her tongue, her words were a little clearer. “I got it,” she repeated. “Should we head back up, or... uh, Virgo? You okay?”
Virgo didn’t answer, nor did she turn away from the blank wall she was staring at or so much as twitch an ear. Leo tiptoed around to her front and peered up at her face, and for a moment panic coursed through her. Virgo’s eyes were gone! Where the hay were Virgo’s eyes? Did they fall out? Were they rolling around underhoof now?
Leo was halfway up on top of the crate she’d put the mead on before she realized she was being stupid and, more importantly, not very brave. Swallowing back the dryness in her throat, she crept back around to Virgo’s front and took a much closer look at her face. Soon enough, she figured out what was really going on: Virgo’s eyes were certainly still in their respective sockets, but they had glazed over with a milky fog that covered every colored part of each one: the black pupils, the sky-blue irises, even the little pink veins snaking out around the sides. All that was left were two snowy white orbs that blended in almost perfectly with the fur lining her face.
Leo laid an experimental hoof on Virgo’s nose, then a moment later poked her gently in the shoulder. When neither action provoked any kind of reaction, she sat back on her haunches and bit her lip, her terror from before coalescing into a queasy feeling deep inside her belly. She’d heard of this happening before: whenever Virgo’s precognition gave her a really big vision, she’d go completely stiff like this, and her eyes would fade out exactly like they were doing now.
But usually, her visions were brief, maybe ten seconds long at the max. This one had been going on for over thirty seconds now and counting, and she didn’t look ready to snap out of it any time soon. Leo’s heart jumped, and a bit of her glow petered away. What the hay was going on? What the hay was Virgo seeing?
• • •
For a moment, Greed thought Master was holding out a hoof to signal for Pride to put a cork in it, but she soon realized he was trying to look at something strapped to his ankle. “Because right now, if my watch is still right after the polarity reversal from your Summoning spell, they’ve got much bigger things to worry about than me,” Master said. He lowered his hoof and his gaze, the latter of which then locked solidly onto Pride.
“By which I of course mean the brutal, bloodthirsty, and highly unsightly armies of the Underworld advancing through the Badlands as we speak, due to reach Oasis by noon tomorrow and New Platinum by about this time the following night. Their legion will tear a path of destruction across the landscape ten thousand bodies wide, and every single iota of that strength will be directed towards the death and dismemberment of the very ponies who locked them away in the first place. They won’t succeed, of course, but that’s hardly the point, is it? They’ll be out of our manes for a day or so, and a day or so is all I’ll need to be ready for them.”
Pride opened his mouth, but not even so much as a grunt slipped out. Master blinked twice, stroked a hoof over his beard, and slowly curled his lips up into a smile.
“Satisfied?”
• • •
It took Virgo another seventeen seconds for her eyelids to finally close. When they opened again, Leo thought she could see that her normal eyes had returned, but right now she couldn’t bear to look straight at them long enough to be sure.
“Was... was that a v-vision?” Leo asked timidly, standing up as straight as she could once her shaking hind hooves managed to find purchase on the floor. “What did you see?”
Even though she was no longer paralyzed, Virgo still didn’t move for almost another twelve seconds. Leo forced herself to look up at the same time Virgo swiveled her head around to look at her, and the fiery mix of determination and anger broiling behind them was enough to set Leo’s mane on end.
“What’s going to happen?” Leo whispered. Her light was fading, cracking apart under the force of her heart pounding against her chest. Virgo pursed her lips and turned the rest of the way towards the stairs.
“What did you see?” Leo asked again.
There was no answer.
“Virgo, what did you see?”
• • •
It wasn’t quite like Master had just stabbed Pride in the gut. Actually, it was much, much worse than that. He’d humiliated the elder Vice, run mental circles around him and made him look like a fool in front of his entire pack. Not that it really bothered Greed in the slightest: call it a character flaw if you will, but she’d never really bought into the whole concept of bowing to the whims and wisdom of any leader, let alone a purely de facto one like Pride. But Master here was starting to write himself into a different story. Pride was all bark and no bite, and the second he turned his back on the gate to his cage, this mortal would—unbelievable as it was—have his way with him.
She admired that. And more to the point, she wanted that kind of influence all to herself.
So while Master retreated to bed for the final time, the gears in Greed’s head were beginning to turn. Summonings were always romantic affairs: brief, passionate, and inevitably over far too soon thanks to the Zodiac. There was something different about this one, though, and that something might just be the kind of thing she could use. Not work with, necessarily; it’d probably grind her nerves down to nubs just pretending to feign interest in this guy. At the end of the day, though, mortals were all the same: soft, squishy bags of gristle and bone, driven by base desires and completely convinced of their own invincibility. And the bigger that bubble of self-confidence got, the more they’d implode once somepony came in and pricked it. Somepony like the Vices. Somepony like her.
Master had reached his door by now. He turned around once he had swung the door open, and this time there was no mistaking it: he was absolutely looking at her. Yes, she could use him, and he could probably use a mare like her. Between his magic and her way with words, emotions, desires, and every other little niggling thought that stumbled through mortal minds, this whole planet would be theirs for the taking. And it was going to be easy. It was going to be fun.
“Like I said,” Master told her just before the door shut behind him. “I’ve got it covered.” And for the first time in whatever could be called her life, Greed believed what her Summoner said.
Turns out, looking on the bright side wasn’t bad at all.