//------------------------------//
// Chapter 25 
// Story: Tales of a Wizard: Flesh Masks 
// by Applechip 
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There is nothing quite as nerve-wracking as being a wizard, in the middle of a large battle, featuring copious amounts of other magic users. This was the primary thought that went through my head as the unicorns of the Equestrian military released an immense first wave of spells at the offending vampires only feet away. Great lances of energy in every color and hue imaginable, hurled past my head, causing me numerous levels of eyestrain on top of the sudden headache. While that was irritating to me, it did far worse to those on the receiving end.

Lances of force, fire, and many other very painful things shot through our conjured shields and landed among the vampires further back in the ocean of ugly before us. Just before they impacted, several dark, semi-transparent shields popped into existence above the vampires, in almost a direct mimic to our own shields. A little over half of our magical strikes hit, splashed, or detonated against these shields, while the rest went around, or broke through. Vampires howled in pain and rage as several of their brethren succumbed to a wide variety of projectiles.

From my position behind Michael, I could see vampires being slammed into the ground under hammers of pure force, receive numerous nasty cuts from tiny shards of ice, or conduct bolts of lightning that fell from the clouds above. One particularly unlucky vampire tried and failed to return the serve when a unicorn used a boulder the size of a full grown stallion as a ball in a game of catch. The result was nasty enough to make me wish I hadn’t tracked the boulder’s path through the air. Feeling left out, I roared a challenge and launched a great ball of fire into the air along with all the others. My spell landed on, and smashed through a dark green pane of energy, and then turned the vampires immediately beneath it, into a bonfire.

Even with all the magically based destruction we shot through the air, we were having very little overall effect. Each vampire that fell was merely one among hundreds. Any injuries or fatalities on their end were completely ignored, and any holes were immediately filled by more vampires. More and more black bodies streamed out of the trees to replace any meager losses we inflicted. It was like we were simply throwing rocks into a sea, a sea made entirely of the Red Court. The first wave of dark forms crashed against our forward-most line of defense, using little more than savage predator instinct and rage to try and break through. Gleaming teeth and razor sharp claws reached out and made contact with our primary line.

Thankfully, Luna and Michael had thought ahead, and our primary line of defense was made up of the biggest, strongest, and sturdiest of ponies Canterlot had to offer. Primarily comprised of earth ponies, the entirety of the forward line was outfitted with the thickest barding possible. In several places their barding was well over an inch thick; how they were able to move under all that weight, I’ll never know. On top of their juggernaut appearance and armor, they were specially trained and quickly set themselves up in a phalanx formation. Rows of spears jutted out in front of, and around the juggernauts. The butt end of the spears were planted into the ground, and under the hooves of the ponies behind them to add more stability. Their spears did a passable impersonation of making the front of our force look like an oversized pincushion, with very VERY large pins. The vampires paid little heed to our petty attempts at defense and charged on, with less than promising results.

When the vampires reached us, just as our first wave of spells were landing behind them, they did their absolute best to push through, and over our spear wall. Claws swiped at the planted spears in an attempt to shift them away, or to simply break them, but to no avail. Black hooves turned talons hit the spears and pathetically glanced away or slid down the shaft of the weapon. The soldiers’ grips on their weapons were too powerful, and their braced stances were too coordinated to be overcome by the simple minded tactics. Their momentum carried the foremost vampires forward and, with very surprised looks on their faces, onto the spears themselves.

Almost a dozen black bodies writhed, impaled on the juggernauts’ spears that made up our front line. They howled as most of them tried to extricate themselves from the weapons that pierced their hides, though some didn’t bother. A few vampires surrendered entirely to their bloodlust and threw any notion of self-preservation to the winds. These particular creatures wrapped their claws around the spears that had pierced their bodies, and pulled themselves further down on the weapons to get at their prey; in some cases the spears pierced through the vampires’ bodies entirely, the metal tips rising up from underneath the leathery hide of their backs. Completely undeterred by their dead or dying comrades, the second line of vampires actually used their impaled fellows as supports, and climbed over our spear wall.

Now, it is true that higher ground is extremely useful in combat. It gives clearer line of sight so tactical information is more apparent, and attacking from above is extremely hard to defend against. That being said though, higher ground can have one major drawback. At that close of a distance, and the relatively short nature of the spear wall, meant that those climbing vampires were making themselves massive targets.

“Oh no you don’t!” I snarled at one black shape that had just clambered over a still snarling, but thoroughly impaled vampire, and reached into my well of power. Aiming carefully so that the tip of my horn pointed at my target, I let fly a controlled burst of fire and force. The vampire, who had pulled back a claw to swipe at one of the heavily armored ponies below, got a face full of fire and was thrown back beyond our spear wall.

“Harry, watch out!” Twilight screamed from beside me.

An instant later, a surge of familiar energy washed over my senses at the same time a brilliant violet light flashed over my head. I craned my neck just in time to see a unicorn vampire leap over the juggernauts, and almost soar towards me, its claws extended and pointed horn glowing ominously; or at least it was at first. About a fraction of a second after I noticed it, Twilight’s spell hit the thing on its horn, hard. The vampire’s head snapped back with the force of the spell, and caused the trajectory of its jump to shift severely. It tumbled and finally landed far to my right, among a particularly angry looking group of ponies clad in golden armor emblazoned with ornate suns, marking them as Celestia’s personal guard.

“Thanks,” I shouted over a rather sickening crunch coming from behind me.

Twilight looked at me with determined eyes, and gave me a brief nod in response. As she did so, my eyes automatically tracked up into the air above the soldiers forming a living steel wall, and spotted something that Twilight hadn’t when she turned to protect me. A sphere of dark nebulous energy shot from the vampire ranks, and soared over the spear wall with a trajectory that would put it right at Twilight’s hooves.

I immediately funneled as much energy as I could through the silver and ruby shield charm on my horn, and shot that energy out to intercept the attack. A deep red plane of shimmering energy popped into existence just over our heads, just before it impacted. One moment later, the blast hit my shield and detonated against it. A wave of force washed over all of us below, but the majority of the damage was absorbed by the, now severely fractured, shield, leaving the rest of us more or less untouched.

Twilight craned her head up to see the remnants of the magical bomb that had nearly landed on her face. “Well, thank you too,” she said with the smallest of grins, and immediately began focusing more energy into her horn.

“I’m sure you two are enjoying yourselves right now,” came Rarity’s somewhat shrill voice, somehow still managing to work in the slightly snobbish tone she used in Canterlot’s streets, “but if you wouldn’t mind, we could use some help here!”

As one, Twilight and I turned back around to face the mare of posh, and hesitated for a second to take full stock of the situation. More and more vampires were attempting to climb over the wall of spears and bodies, and were only barely being held back by the nearby ponies. One right after the other, vampires climbed and poked their heads into our line of sight, whereupon the majority of them almost immediately fell away, suffering from some form of sensory overload.

Rarity stood just behind the line of juggernauts, her eyes clamped shut and her teeth clenched tightly in intense concentration. Her horn glowed like a lantern as she launched illusion after illusion into the air above our front line, and into the faces of the vampires. Grouped together just behind Rarity, was a small detachment of armored unicorns that had taken upon themselves to use Rarity as a tagging system. As soon as one of Rarity’s mind-numbing illusions hit a vampire, and it didn’t immediately fall backwards, the unicorns homed in on the dizzied target and hit it with varying forms of lethal fanfare. On Rarity’s opposite side, just in front of her and a little to her right, Michael stood defiantly in the middle of the defensive line.

Taking up a space between the juggernauts, Michael created a hole in the spear wall, a hole that the vampires were eager to exploit. From our position, we could see that easily the majority of the nearby vampires saw the beacon of light that was Michael, and flooded to extinguish it. Michael stood hoof to hoof beside the spear wielding juggernauts, but without a spear of his own, or a similar prepared soldier behind him, there was a notable gap in the spear wall directly in front of him.

Normally, an inconstancy in a defensive line provides a weakness that can collapse the entire line, but Michael and whatever power that kept him going were not so easily overrun. The danger of the spears forced the nearby vampires to funnel themselves and limit their numbers as they tried to press through the “hole” in our defenses, this led to the vampires having to square off against the Fist of God one or two at a time. If they were able to swarm him, as per usual Red Court tactics, they might have been able to do something, as it was, not so much.

Amoracchius viciously tore through air, flesh, and bone with equal disdain. Michael cut down vampires as they made themselves available for the holy night. Beneath his relatively light helmet, Michael’s teeth clenched around Amoracchius’s handle as he made practiced slashes, swings, and stabs. Whatever loss in swordsmanship Michael may have suffered in his new body had long since been regained through the few weeks of rigorous training. His blade never seemed to miss its mark once, despite the cramped space he was fighting in. Michael’s swings never even brought Amoracchius close enough to endanger the ponies beside him, though whether or not it could with their armor as thick as it was, I wasn’t sure.

A small scythe on the end a long chain whizzed past my right ear and buried itself in the sternum of a vampire that had managed to avoid Rarity’s spell work. With a wrenching motion of her neck, Applejack pulled the bleeding vampire out of the sky and set it at the hooves of the soldiers below. Applejack cast a quick glare back at me once her weapon was pulled free of her target. “You heard Rarity. You just goin’ to stand there like a foal, or you goin’ to help?”

Beside me, Twilight had already begun her job and multiple streams of purple energy erupted from her to shower over the vampires beyond. I mentally scolded myself over being so easily distracted, and wordlessly threw my power along with Twilight’s and the other unicorns around us. Fire roared to life as I shot volley after volley of it from the tip of my horn. I chose to prioritize the vampires already on top, or near the top, of the cluttered spear wall, as they were the most dangerous to those maintaining the spears below.

The closest vampire to me had managed to perch itself on the body of one of its comrades, which lay suspended in-between two large spear, creating a semi-solid bridge between them. With its hind legs gripping both the corpse and shafts of the spears, it reached down and began swinging deadly sharp claws at one of the juggernauts underneath it, aiming for the slightly less armored portions around the neck. Even though soldier’s armor was lighter where the vampire struck, it still held well against the awkward angle of attack. The soldier groaned in pain as the vampire hit, its claws likely causing little more than a bruise, and shifted slightly so that the thicker metal of his helmet covered more of his neck, never once losing contact with the spear he held steady. While the soldier had armor to protect it from the vampire, the vampire had no such protection from me.

In preparation for a more powerful attack, the vampire leaned backward and raised both of its clawed forelegs into the air, only to receive what I like to call, instant karma. My blast of fire caught the thing full in its face. Its body, and whatever was left of its head, was shot backward into throng of vampires beyond. Resisting the impulse to shout some insult at the remains, I directed my attention to the next nearest threat to repeat the process.

Twilight caught on to my tactics before the ex-vampire even hit the ground, and wove together a complimentary working immediately. Just as I was building another blast of flame, lightning shot forth from Twilight’s horn, and sped towards the defensive line. To my surprise, the lightning missed the few vampires that had climbed over the small piles of bodies and spears completely; instead it struck home on the head of a particularly large leaf-blade tipped spear, several feet from any possible target. Most everything nearby, ponies and vampires alike, paused in their respective activities to watch the extremely flashy lightshow whittle away into nothing; a few of the vampires actually began to laugh at the apparently wasted effort. What they didn’t seem to notice was that the large spearhead held a very bright glow, even after the spell faded.

About a second or two later, the abnormally large metal tip of the spear erupted, and long arcs of electricity shot out from it, branching out in all directions. These tendrils of power, whether by design or some law of science I’d never learned, ignored the metal armor of the spear holders, and instead zipped from spearhead to spearhead, creating a continual net of electricity along the tips of our spear wall. While the arcing electricity ignored us below, it had no trouble impacting and passing through the flesh of the vampires imbedded in, or climbing over the defenses.

I gave a short bark of laughter as the vampires that were previously snickering at Twilight’s spell, were forced into twitching heaps, thanks to the electricity forcing every muscle cell in their bodies to contract simultaneously. Any vampires embedded in the spears, and didn’t have the good grace to bleed out, were unable to escape the flowing energy and were burned to a crisp within a few seconds. Those standing on top of the imbedded vampires, flopped around with absolutely no muscle control. Some stumbled over the side and rolled into a twitching heap in front of the battle ready ponies behind the juggernauts’ line. The smart ones saw the threat coming and leapt backwards towards their fellows before the electricity could reach them. In the space of a few seconds, Twilight had created a large and very strong field of defense against any landlocked foe.

After all this is over, maybe lessons with Shining can wait. There’re a few things I could learn from her first.

I shook my head clear of those thoughts, and redirected my energies back to the task before me. With our focused efforts, a veritable downpour of magic slammed into the vampires trying to navigate around or over the spears. With spells varying from illusions and stuns, meant to distract or shake the target, to spells of outright force and power, not to mention Twilight’s electric fence, we managed to force our foes to stop their advance.

For a short time, the vampires continued their attempt to brute force their way over us, but they soon realized that trying to fight their way through a hail of magic and a forest of electric spears wasn’t a battle worth fighting. It was then that the situation of the battle shifted dramatically. Why overpower, when you can outlast, after all?

Several growling shouts rang out from among the vampire ranks, and the waves of the creatures parted and began shifting around us. The adrenaline pumping through my system made it feel like we had already spent half an hour fighting, but our initial contact couldn’t have been much more than a minute or two at the most. During this time, the remainder of the vampires flooded out the trees on either side of the clearing and was only just then coming into contact with our forces, in a motion not too dissimilar from a pincer tactic.

The entirety of our thousand strong force sprang into action the moment the last of us cleared the tree line we had come from. True to equine instincts given the situation, our base tactic was to herd together for strength in numbers, and to otherwise be the unbreakable circular wall of steel to the vampires’ ferocity. At the center of the mess of clanking armor, stressed shouts, and rushing soldiers, the fresh trainees and volunteer civilians hurried to clear a small space for the field medics. I could vaguely make out Fluttershy’s outline and unique coloration as she began flying around and throwing down clean bed sheets/operating sites. Heavier armored earth ponies, and some of the more stout unicorns, lined the outer edge closest to the encroaching threat. Large spears similar to the juggernauts’ around me were swiftly fanned out and braced against the ground. Moving with practiced ease, the highly trained soldiers formed the outer circle, and braced themselves just as the vampires hit us from both sides.

Here’s something I never thought I could legitimately say, but the soldiers, guardsponies, and all around military of Equestria, was far better equipped to deal with vampires than any modern-day human military. It’s common practice for human soldiers and police to don bulletproof vests, or some other similar armor, when anticipating a combat scenario. These armors are typically made from a weave of dense ballistic fibers. They are designed to take the impact from a singular fast moving object, i.e. a bullet, and disperse the energy that would normally be focused on a singular point, to across a wide area, rendering it painful yet nonlethal. Ballistic weave however, is about effective against a vampire’s claws as cardboard. For a more effective armor, you need to think back a couple hundred years, to around when plate mail and chainmail were the height of fashion. Hardened steel plates and woven metal rings were designed for the sole purpose of thwarting blades and other slashing weapons, and are extremely effective at doing just that. As it turns out, the only thing better than wearing protective chainmail into a fight against creatures whose main weapons are slashing claws, is wearing heavy chainmail and suffering no loss in mobility or balance thanks to four strong legs ending in nice sturdy hooves.

From my relatively limited vantage point, I saw the waves of black forms crash against the armored ponies and spears to our sides. Vampires snarled, wrestled through planted spears, swung claws down with murderous intent, and in many cases only managed to batter pitifully against plated steel. Claws delivered harsh poundings and vicious swipes that would have left human soldiers with their bodies broken and their throats ripped open, but only staggered or injured the plated ponies. I was truly lucky to have such allies on my side, but there is no such thing as a perfect defense, and vampires are nothing if not exploitative.

The hoof picked specially trained juggernauts that created the nearly impenetrable wall of defiant steel, stood only at the forefront of the assembled ponies, where the majority of the enemy focus was likely to be. Those behind us and around the sides were the more standard Equestrian soldiers. Vampires surged around us to envelop our force completely, in a manner annoyingly similar to the tactic we had used in the Manehattan alleyway. They poked and prodded against our defenses until they eventually would find, and then exploit an opening.

About fifty feet off to my left, just when the ponies along the outer line shifted from the specially equipped juggernauts to the more standard soldiers, the vampires surged forward in a very swift offensive. Three separate black skinned creatures pushed ahead and worked together to knock away the spears threatening them. I saw them coming, and I wheeled around to use my magic to intervene, but the chaos of large battles are never so accommodating. The moment I gathered power to help the soldier, five bolts of swirling green and black magic arched through the air over our spear wall, and speed right for us. A few unicorns saw the incoming attack and brought up their own shields, but it wouldn’t be enough. I snarled a curse through clenched teeth and turned my horn skyward as a conjured up a shield above Twilight and I. Without my intervening, the vampires got past our spears, and in the faces of those wielding them. Three vampires reached out and hooked their claws under the woven plates of our soldiers’ armor. In the blink of an eye, five Equestrian soldiers simply vanished, pulled into the throng of monsters by the tips of their claws and with their supernatural strength, and thereby creating a wider opening for other vampires.

I could only watch helplessly as they died, and grimace as the vampires’ magic splashed against my shield. I hated it. I hated them. I hated not being able to protect others from the vampires’ clutches. I also knew that was only one small area out of the thousand strong force we had brought. I knew that there were certainly several more soldiers falling all around me, but I just couldn’t see them. I hated feeling weak with every fiber of my being. All that hate and anger was terrific fuel for me and my magic.

The red plane of magic that was my shield grew and grew as I fed more power into it. I positioned it just overhead and angled it slightly so that anything that hit it would hopefully rebound back into the vampires. My goal was, more or less, accomplished. A fairly steady barrage of black -tinted green globs of energy rained down upon us, their origins safely hidden away in the confusion beyond our spears. Like most of the unicorns of this world, the vampire unicorns were capable of utilizing magic, but they were by no means masters of it. The individual bolts weren’t very powerful, and they ricocheted off my shield with minimal difficulty on my part, but there were a lot of them. Showers of magic hit the myriad of shields above us, and several flew back into the mass of vampires they’d come from. However, several more managed to slip in-between the gaps of our shields.

Every so often the odd piece of magical ordinance impacted the ground not too far from my hooves, causing me to jump slightly and my shield to waver. One unfortunate unicorn, that was dutifully firing blast after blast from his horn into the vampires, was hit by a bolt of energy that had slipped through our defenses. The hostile spell managed to hit him squarely over the center of his spine and crackled loudly with a small detonation. His legs folded underneath him as he crumpled to the ground, the armor on his back was thoroughly charred and smoking. After a brief second of consideration, I noted that his chest was still rising and falling with labored breaths.

Almost immediately after I noticed that, I was greeted with the subtle buffeting of nearby wing beats. Fluttershy, like an angel from on high, fell out of the sky and landed standing over the wounded pony. As though summoned by his pain, Fluttershy immediately began checking the soldier’s vitals.

“It’s alright. Everything’s going to be alright. You’re going to be just fine” she repeated over and over like some kind of mantra, apparently oblivious to the soldier’s inability to hear her through his unconsciousness. Her ears were plastered to the side of her head in an attempt to drown out any surrounding noise. “Let’s get you out of here,” she said once she had done her preliminary checks. Without once looking at us, or anything other than the wounded unicorn, Fluttershy wrapped all four of her legs around the soldier’s body, and took off into the sky over us. Her large wings were just enough to carry her and her cargo to the medics at the center of our group.

Well, at least he’ll be fine, I thought to myself as I watched Fluttershy fly off, content with the knowledge that at least that unicorn soldier was moderately safe. I chose not to dwell on the fact that if this all went catastrophically bad, then that one life would be the least of my worries. I turned my focus back to reinforcing my shield, when something unexpected washed over my senses. I felt an odd pulling in the energies around me, something like the current of water as it rushes towards a drain.

Both Twilight and Rarity paused in their respective spell casting to look questioningly around them, their ears twitching at every possible sound. Whatever it was, they had felt it as well. It took another second of relative silence before another disturbing fact came to my attention: my shield wasn’t taking any more hits. My heart pounding a little faster in my chest, I looked up, and sure enough, the barrage of enemy spells had ceased raining down on us. A lead weight dropped into my stomach as I tried to figure out why the vampires had apparently stopped attacking us magically.

“Dresden!” Michael roared at me, his weapon stuck in the ground next to him freeing his mouth to talk. As soon as he had my attention, Michael pointed a hoof off back behind the mess of vampires that had momentarily backed away from the spear wall. The creatures were presumably wary of the possibility of another electrified spear fence. “Dresden, they’re up to something! I can see them working together further back!” Michael shouted, still gesturing furiously into the distance.

I wordlessly stepped forward until I was just behind Michael, and squinted off into the distance where he was pointing. I strained my eyes as I tried to distinguish individual shapes among the sea of black bodies, and eventually managed to spot what had Michael so worried. A good ways behind the thick ring of encircling vampires, several dozen vampire unicorns stood in a large circle, just definable as such because of the several glowing horns. On a hunch, I reached out my magical senses all around me, and unfortunately confirmed my fears. The energies that were still shifting unnaturally around us were all moving to a single point, the center of the vampires’ circle, where a sizeable orb of energy was growing. They were collecting a metric ton of energy together for one massive attack.

“The circle!” I practically screamed while desperately pointing a hoof ahead of me. I turned around and stared at the unicorns nearest me, my eyes nearly popping out of my head. “Disrupt the circle!”

“Disrupt it? Disrupt it how?” Rarity asked, shuffling uncomfortably in place.

“Hit it!” I shouted back. “Stun them, cripple them, kill them, I don’t care! Just stop their working!” Before I even finished speaking, the majority of the unicorns within earshot of me quickly redirected their attention to begin raining volleys of magic down on the circle of vampires. They moved with an order and precision that you can really only get from militaristic training.

“Harry, move, I don’t want to hit you by accident,” Twilight grunted, her voice muted slightly in her concentration.

I refocused my eyes to the lavender unicorn, and realized that in my panic, I had put myself solidly between Twilight’s brightly glowing horn, and her new targets. I hastily danced my way beside her, lest I lose my stringy black tail to her power. No sooner had I dodged out of the way, Twilight grunted with exertion and fired a large bolt of almost pure electricity into the air. I quickly took aim, and let loose a much smaller blast of fire to fly just behind her lightning. We watched as several dozen pieces of magical ordinance soared through the air, and one by one, crashed against transparent shields hidden from our eyes. I could only gape as, about a hundred feet from the ground, every single one of our spells merely faded into nonexistence, leaving the targets below completely untouched and still gathering together a massive amount of power.

“What?!” Rarity exclaimed. “Why those sneaky little-”

“Sir, it looks like the vampires not in the circle, are protecting it,” offered one of Celestia’s golden clad unicorn guards.

I ground my teeth in frustration, partially at the vampires determined to make my life more difficult, and partially at soldiers that spout information a foal could’ve gleaned. “I see that,” I shot back. “Keep hitting them. Wear down their shields if you have too. Whatever happens, they cannot finish that thing!”

The unicorn guard nodded at me, before turning back around to the assembled unicorns behind him. He barked some quick orders that were more or less just copies of what I had said, and they all once again ran power through their horns. I clamped my ears flush to my skull in an attempt to drown out the rest of the ongoing battle all around me. My horn exploded with crimson energy as I launched even more torrents of fire into the sky, which were swiftly accompanied by many more friendly spells. Rains of fire, lightning, ice, dazzling illusions, and hammers of force fell down upon the circle of unicorn vampires, and every single one missed its mark.

No matter what we did, no matter how much force we applied, we just could not make a connecting blow with any of the circle. Every single spell we threw either glanced of a shield and spun away harmlessly, or simply exploded against the invisible shields. I swept my horn in a wide arc ahead of me and shot off several small fireballs, in the hopes of finding a small gap in between the individual shields, but to no avail. It was almost as though there was a single invisible dome over the entire circle. Eventually somepony did manage a lucky shot that slipped closer than any of us had managed, but before it could connect, a random earth pony vampire leapt up from the ground and willingly took the entirety of a white hot bolt of flame. As soon as I saw the spell slip through, I tried to shoot more through the same gap, only to have the transparent shields shift and cover the exposure.

Sweat matted the fur of my face as I continued throwing hostile spells at the circle from every possible angle I could manage. The feeling of dread in the back of my mind, and the lead weight in my gut, grew in direct proportion with every spell that failed to connect. All the while, the collection of energy at the center of the vampires’ circle grew exponentially by the second; until, after almost a full minute of constant barrage, something finally broke.

Whatever spell they were working seemed to reach its critical mass, and promptly detonated. A wave of displaced energy rushed out from the circle and crashed over us like a tidal wave washing over beachfront property. I barely had the time to catch my breath before the cloud of swirling colors reached us. The twisting mess of energies played merry hell with my magic senses, and I was forced to close off my mind from the environment, or else suffer the mother of all migraines.
“Ugh, what just happened?” Twilight muttered once the disrupting cloud had passed.

“Give me a second, my head’s still spinning,” I responded back. Once I could again differentiate between my hoof and my tail, I peered back at the circle in the hopes of spotting the aftermath of whatever spell had disrupted the vampires’ working. I was sorely disappointed. The disrupting cloud wasn’t from the vampires’ spell backfiring, it was the simple blowback caused when their spell was completed.

A huge orb of swirling black and green magic, the size of a large bus, coalesced above the vampires, and began to steamroll its way directly over us. Even from the great distance away, I could feel the massive spell radiating the greasy corruption I’d come to associate with Red Court magic. My eyes grew to the size of dinner plates and my ears fell limp against the side of my head as I stared up at the massive ball of death that was flying straight for us. Against the kind of power that my senses were picking up on, I knew that, even if all the unicorns present worked together, we were never going to be able to make a shield strong enough to withstand that power, not in a thousand years. In a matter of seconds, there was going to be a mile deep crater right where we were standing.

Applejack retrieved her scythe-tipped chain lasso from the throat of one particularly unlucky vampire that had tried to jump over the spear wall, and turned her eyes up at the magical nuke flying at us. “Twilight, Dresden, you’ve got a plan for that thing right? Please say yes.” she asked, her voice cracking slightly under her sudden nerves.

Without answering her, I peered around and met the frightened eyes of my fellow unicorns, including Rarity and Twilight. They all felt the same thing I had. They all knew just how powerful the thing heading for us was. Rarity exchanged a sorrowful look with Applejack, while Twilight actually offered me a reassuring smile. I returned the small smile and looked back up at the massive spell as it reached the apex of its arch.

Well… damn.

My, very brief, thought process was interrupted when Twilight stepped up beside me and pressed herself against my side. She wrapped her right foreleg around my left, and I leaned down to nuzzle against her neck. Hey, if I was going to die, I was going to die feeling some form of happiness. Twilight pulled away a little and opened her mouth to give some form of reassurance I’m sure, when, for the second time that evening, my brain was addled by disruptive magic.

A large bolt of some dark blue energy, that radiated bone deep frost like some kind of inverse sun, roared over our heads. The sizeable bolt of magic met the vampires’ spell in mid air, visibly dissipated into it like pouring together two different liquids, and actually stopped it in its tracks. The moment the blast of cold infused itself into the massive working, the surface area of the giant orb began rippling in increasingly violent motions. It continued doing that for about five seconds, at the end of which it resembled more of a gigantic pincushion rather than the smooth ball it had been earlier, and then it lost the energy necessary to hold it together and exploded spectacularly, and properly this time. Now because the vampires’ spell was still largely located above the vampires’ forces, when it blew, the majority of the failed spell went, either harmlessly into the air, or into the vampires below.

Everypony cheered as the same spell that was meant to decimate us, released a massive wave of pure force that severely crippled the vampires nearest it. I could see individual black skinned creatures that were forcefully knocked to the ground by the waved. A few very unlucky ones actually managed to break a leg or two when they were thrown to the ground, but by far the worst damage was done to those that had created the spell in the first place. The circle of vampire unicorns at the extreme edge of my vision, all lay dead where they had stood, each of their heads smoked slightly. The only explanation I could come up with was that they must have been still linked to the spell and were keeping it contained. When the spell tore apart, some of that energy must have bled back through their respective links, and fried their brains. Considering the kind of power they had thrown together, I was surprised that they didn’t simply explode as well.

Using the very brief glimpse I caught of the spell that saved our lives, I followed its trajectory back to a spot somewhere above our entrenched forces. I quickly noticed that the murky cloud, which had been hovering over us during the whole ordeal, had a sizeable hole on the side facing us. Before the shifting clouds sealed over the hole again, I managed to catch a glimpse of dark blue fur, and a self-satisfied grin.

I barked out a burst of laughter and reared back on my hind legs while waving my forelegs out in front of me, “Thank you Luna, you conniving and opportunistic princess, thank you!”

Several of the seasoned soldiers near me, who had all worked under Celestia and Luna for years, gave me looks of extreme relief mixed with a good bit of indignation at my words. Twilight and the others didn’t seem to mind much though, in fact they cheered just as hard as I did when the vampires’ spell exploded. Rarity in particular bounced on the spot as she watched the aftermath of her teacher’s spell.

Luna’s spell, while not as powerful as the incoming nuke, did what every wizard worth the name loved to do, it cheated. It unbalanced the enemy spell, and caused it to become hostile towards the ones that had made it. In the strictest sense, it was the very definition of conniving and opportunistic, and I loved every second of it. Not only did it lessen the Red Court’s ability to attack us with magic, but it also forced those that were attacking us physically to stagger back under the wave of the explosion, giving us precious time and breathing room to redirect our attention towards those that weren’t hit by the detonation.

The unicorns around me immediately began their barrage anew, their spells roaring through the air and now only occasionally hitting against enemy shields. I was about to join them, when I noticed something that I wouldn’t have seen had I not been looking up at the cloud around Luna. It was then that I remembered that the hardship we were facing on the ground was only half of our conflict, I had completely forgotten about the pegasi aerial battle taking place over our heads, and it was not going well.

It’s true that the majority of the vampires were ground locked, and we therefore bore the brunt of the fight as far as straight numbers are concerned, but we also had the immense benefit of an entrenched area. The pegasi had no such advantage, Equestrian soldiers and vampiric pegasi tore through the sky with absolutely no rhyme or reason to them. Some soldiers and scouts tried to fall back on their training and fly in arrowhead formations, but the chaos of three-dimensional combat proved far too much for such tactics. Whenever more than two soldiers flew in close formation, black forms with bat-like wings focused on and dove for the center of these groups, forcing them to break apart or else collide with the vampires.

Some of our pegasi hastily brought their crossbows to bear on the Red Court, and loosed as many bolts as they could. They aimed for the crippling shots, going for the occasional bolt to joint, but largely focusing on punching holes in leathery wings. With the large amount of damage necessary to effectively bring them down, and the relatively small bolts available, very few vampires fell from such debilitating injuries. Instead, the majority of our flying allies were forced to draw their stashed daggers and swords, and engage in strike and flee tactics. Several armored pegasi, with sabers clamped in their teeth, swooped across the sky in seemingly random motions. Their careful flying brought them across Red Court that were distracted by others, and sliced cleanly through some exposed flesh. By the time the vampire of the moment turned to face their assailant, they had already flown off to the next target. Rinse and repeat.

However, in the formless chaos of the sky, the vampires could easily clash with, and then overwhelm, our pegasi with their superior strength and agility. With outstretched claws and fangs, vampires collided with pegasi in midair, and simply latched onto them. Within that close embrace, claws flashed and raked against the captured pony, rending apart metal plates, cloth tunics, and flesh with equal disdain. Pieces of torn armor and flecks of red blood rained down beneath any pony unfortunate enough to be so engaged. As though not satisfied with simple mauling, once a vampire latched onto a pegasus, it began beating its leathery wings furiously around its prey. With the combined distractions of blinding pain from sharp claws and the buffeting of vampire wings, the pegasus would be too lost to be able to do anything to save itself. On top of that, the beating wings were angled such that both vampire and pony were brought down into a landing, far outside of our entrenched line, and immediately set upon by countless Red Court. Any poor souls that found themselves outside of our circle were at least granted a quick death, if not a clean one.

In the relatively short time I was watching, I saw friendly pegasi dropping like flies. Everywhere I looked, vampires seized feathery wings and furry hides, clawed at them relentlessly, and rode them down to enemy territory. Our pegasi were simply outnumbered and outclassed against the Red Court’s ferocity. It seemed the sole reason the vampires didn’t have immediate air superiority, was because of the dark cloud floating above the center of our army.

Several dozen icicles, each the size of my foreleg, shot out in all directions every few seconds. These projectiles flew blindingly fast and impacted against the vampires, shattering on contact into countless shards of razor ice. These icicles were rarely lethal by themselves, rather their purpose seemed to be more to debilitate and cripple.

I was greeted to a terrific view of one vampire flying directly over my head, who was hit square in the chest by one of Luna’s icicles. Now, the impact itself was likely enough to put the creature down for good. Its sternum was reduced to gravel and caved in on itself from the point of impact; thick black blood flowed freely from the wound, but that was only a fun secondary effect. As soon as the icicle dealt its base damage, it disintegrated into a sparkling cloud that enveloped the vampire’s body. Dozens of long neat cuts simply appeared over the entirety of its body, as though an amateur torturer got over excited with a box cutter. While almost no part of the vampire’s body was left unscathed, the damage was largely superficial, only enough to cut through the upper layer of skin and expose those twitchy little pain receptors; the real damage was reserved for the wings. The tiny shards of Luna’s ice tore apart the creature’s wings like buck shot through paper towels. The large leathery sections that made up the majority of its wings were ripped to shreds in an instant, leaving only the spindly bones that supported the wings leftover. Without the upward thrust that its wings could no longer give, the severely bleeding vampire came crashing down just a few feet behind me; and if Luna’s spell and subsequent crash didn’t kill the thing, then the crowd of armed soldiers it landed among, most certainly did.

The entire scene of the air combat was, in itself, almost beautiful. Feathered and leathery bat-like wings fought for dominance in a manner that brought to mind several pieces of art depicting angels fighting against demons. Vampires and pegasi of the Equestrian military dodged and weaved around each other with an odd sense of grace that almost disguised the fact that several of my allies were fighting and dying while I stood there gawking. I finally managed to break myself out of my reverie when one particular pegasus caught my attention.

Rainbow Dash navigated through the chaos littering the sky at an unbelievable speed, leaving a faint rainbow trail behind her as she wove her way around friend and foe alike. Her chainmail armor and cap were worn ragged; the mail was actually torn in a few places where a vampire had managed to hook a claw or two under it. Several small red lines were apparent across her unprotected face, any blood that escaped through these lines were lost in the slipstream behind Rainbow. Her crossbow lay unloaded and unused on her foreleg brace. Instead, a sizeable wavy bladed dagger was held in-between her clenched teeth, both the blade and the side of her face the blade was on were stained in black blood.

During Rainbow’s frantic speeding across the sky, she made it a point to bring her path across every vampire she could easily reach. In the space of a few seconds, she casually swept her dagger across two vampires that were in her path. The strength of the dagger combined with Rainbow’s speed, meant that the first vampire howled in agony as Rainbow exposed a section of its ribcage, and the second simply fell out of the sky, its wing completely severed and falling several feet away. These actions did not go unnoticed however.

No less than six vampires were already hot on Rainbow’s tail from the moment I spotted her, snarling and slashing their claws at the multi-colored hairs. Rainbow beat her wings furiously and employed a few complex twists and turns to put some distance between her and her would be attackers. While Rainbow’s speed and raw aerial talent was indeed more than a match for any single vampire, they only went so far against a large group. Any distance she managed to gain, was quickly retaken by the creatures, plus an extra inch or two. Rainbow wasn’t going to escape them for long.

“Twilight! Rarity!” I shouted over the cacophony of our ongoing ground based combat, and pointed my right hoof up at the cyan pegasus. “Eyes up!”

Both unicorns paused their respective casting to shoot a glance at me, and then up at what I was pointing at. Both of their eyes widened slightly, apparently having not noticed what was going on above us either.

“Oh no, Rainbow!” Rarity cried once she realized what she was seeing.

Twilight jumped forward, her horn already glowing ominously. “Harry, Rarity, focus on the ones nearest to her. Hit them with everything you can. They are not getting Rainbow, period,” she shouted authoritatively, every bit of fear from her voice evaporated as she immediately took charge of the situation. Her need to protect those close to her, especially after what happened to her parents, overrode all other thought processes in her mind, and was about to put her to the test.

I shut my mouth and did as I was told, ignoring the fact that I was technically her commanding officer. Short and precise bolts of power flew from each of our horns as we tried to support Rainbow. Bits of fire, lightning, and clouds of white light flew around our targets without any real sense of accuracy. Rarity managed to get a lucky shot in, and enveloped the head of one of the trailing vampires in a cloud of seizure inducing light and sounds; the moment it stopped to fight off the spell, a massive bolt of lightning shot across the sky to strike its chest, stopping, or more likely, exploding its heart. Twilight snarled as she refocused her attention to the more dangerous pursuers, but was having very little luck in doing so. Baring pure luck, we just couldn’t get an accurate shot off. Rainbow and the vampires following her were simply moving too damn fast and were bobbing around too much for us to follow.

“Rainbow! Rainbow, down ‘ere!” bellowed a loud southern drawl just off to my side. I paused in my spell casting to peer around and spotted Applejack standing just behind us, her eyes focused on where our pathetically inaccurate spells were going. Far above us, Rainbow had also heard the booming voice of her friend and turned a large pink eye towards the imposing orange mare. Applejack grinned ferociously once she got Rainbow’s attention, and raised a hoof to touch her chained scythe, “Herd ‘em up, Rainbow!”

Rainbow’s eyes widened in shock, but then she returned the grin through the dagger’s handle in her mouth. Rainbow made a hard turn in midair and let out a massive burst of speed as she flew lower to the ground and shot straight for us, her pursuers just a few feet behind her. Behind us, Applejack bit down on her length of chain and began twirling it above her head like she would her normal lasso, the scythe on the end flailed around dangerously.

I had to glance between Applejack and the pegasus speeding towards us several times before something finally clicked in the back of my head and I got a hunch as to what they were doing. Operating on my assumptions, I rammed power through my horn again, for the increasingly rare non-destructive spell. It’s a little depressing how much of my knowledge is bent towards causing as much destruction as possible.

Once I released my pent up energy, the magical equivalent of fireworks shot from my horn. Dozens of brightly flashing stars flew up into the air on either side of Rainbow. As she passed by them and the vampires went between the hovering fireworks, they detonated in a dazzling show of light and sound. Each individual star had very little actual power in them, just enough to distract rather than do any harm. The vampires pursuing Rainbow reacted to the sudden display just how I hoped they would; without knowing exactly what the little lights were, they continued the pursuit, but did so while edging away from the lights as much as possible. What was a formless crowd of vampires chasing after Rainbow became a passable impersonation of an aerial conga line starting a few feet behind the pegasus mare.

The moment Rainbow passed over our heads, Applejack tossed her militarized lasso up into the air. The scythe head of AJ’s lasso struck home in the lead vampire, the long blade sinking deep into the creature’s throat. A look of immense surprise, and more than a little pain, crossed the vampire’s face when the large piece of metal perforating its esophagus, also stopped it dead in the air as Applejack’s teeth pulled back on the long chain dangling from it. The two vampires immediately behind the lead one couldn’t react fast enough to the sudden stop, and promptly crashed into the creature. The first three fell to the ground in a tangle of confused limbs, and one bloodied twisting scythe. The soldiers they landed among made swift work of the two incapacitated vampires, and the one already partially beheaded one. The rest of the rather large collection of vampires that had randomly joined the chase, broke off in search for less hazardous prey, all but two at least.

Two straggling members of the Red Court hovered in place just over our heads, confused by their sudden lack of a leader; which made them perfect candidates to be examples of their proper place in the world. Twilight and I took aim at the stationary vampires, and let loose two equally large blasts of roaring fire. A brief second later, two vaguely vampire shaped charcoal briquettes fell to the ground several feet away, any soldiers near them hurriedly moved away to avoid the intense heat. Beside me, Twilight gave a contented smile at having helped protect her friend.

“Whew, thanks for the save guys,” Rainbow chided as she flew down to hover over us, the dagger that was clenched in her teeth, was stowed back in the harness around her chest. “As it turns out, those things really don’t like it if you buck them in the head.”

At those joking words, Twilight pivoted on the spot and thrust her head against Rainbow’s. “You need to be more careful, Rainbow! What if Applejack hadn’t been here to help you?” Twilight cried out, her face an interesting blend of anger, desperation, and relief.

Rainbow recognized the look on Twilight’s face, and raised her forelegs in mock surrender, “Alright, alright, don’t get your overcoat in a twist.” Twilight backed off of her friend a few steps, her expression relaxing by several degrees. Rainbow just grinned and removed a bolt from her bandolier to reload her crossbow. “It’s gonna take more than a few freaky vampires to take me down, cause you guys got my back, and you know I’ve got yours.”

Such brazen words should never be uttered, ever, in your entire life. The powers that be, heard Rainbow’s statement, and decided to put it to the test. A subtle, and familiar, whimpering combined with terrified breaths just barely reached our ears over the sounds of combat all around us. As a whole, we turned our heads to pinpoint what had made the desperate noises.

Fluttershy, along with a few other medical pegasi, was hovering almost fifty yards away, and a few feet over the heads of the entrenched ponies along the outer perimeter. Beneath her, Fluttershy held a severely wounded unicorn, red blood dripped from a long gash along the unicorn’s neck. Fluttershy wound all four of her legs around the barrel of her ward and beat her wings furiously, just barely managing to stay airborne. In the air between her and us, the rather large group of vampires that had abandoned their pursuit of Rainbow Dash, had decided to turn their attention to the yellow pegasus. Fluttershy’s bright yellow and pink coloration naturally drew the eye of anything looking her way, which combined with the wounded unicorn restricting her every movement, meant that she was a prime target for any hungry vampire.

Fluttershy saw the cloud of vampires coming, and cried out louder as she beat her wings ever harder. She could only inch her way towards the medical encampment at the center of our group, burdened as she was. Even with the bloodthirsty creatures swiftly overtaking her, she only tightened her hold on the unicorn she was holding, unwilling to abandon the injured pony.

Before any of us could so much as blink, the air violently shifted around us as Rainbow Dash launched herself forward, actually creating a small vacuum in her wake that forced me to take a step to balance myself. “Fluttershy!” Rainbow screamed, as she rocketed towards the struggling medic.

Dash’s natural born speed served her well, and managed to outstrip the vampires just as they were about a foot away from Fluttershy. I hadn’t realized that, somewhere in the distance between us and the vampires, Rainbow had worked her hooves and removed the dagger from her harness again. As Rainbow passed through the sizeable cloud of creatures, one or two of them simply fell out of the sky. Whatever blows Rainbow made to them, were far too fast for my eyes to track. While she had down a few of the nearer vampires, there was no way for Rainbow to effectively stop all of them, not before they reached Fluttershy anyway.

So, with an almighty heave of her wings, Rainbow threw herself forward, not at any of the vampires, but at Fluttershy. Just before impact, Rainbow turned her body perpendicular with the ground, her underside faced towards the yellow pegasus. The instant Rainbow’s hooves touched on the medic, she kicked out with all four legs, hard. Almost all of Rainbow’s momentum transferred into Fluttershy, and their positions reversed. Fluttershy gasped as she was suddenly propelled forward towards the makeshift medic site, and out of harm’s way, though the same couldn’t be said for Rainbow.

The same shift in momentum that propelled Fluttershy forward, froze Rainbow in place. It only took Rainbow a brief second to reorient herself from her shaken standstill, and get back to a position where she could flee. That precious second though, was all the nearby vampires needed to press their advantage.

“Dash, MOVE!” Twilight screamed at the top of her lungs, her expression instantly reverting back to a desperate panic. But it was too late.

Hungry and furious with the rainbow-maned mare for allowing their prey to escape, the same vampires we had repelled just moments ago, latched themselves onto Rainbow. Black skinned bodies and limbs covered the pegasus, hiding her completely from our view. Any yells or shouts Rainbow may have made, were likewise overpowered by snarls of the creatures around her. Almost the instant the several vampires grabbed their prey, they began beating their leathery wings in unison, pulling the confused mass of bodies towards enemy territory faster than I would’ve thought possible. The entire way from sky to hostile ground, the vampires ripped and tore at their captive as much as they could in such a confined space. Large pieces of chainmail, strips of linen, chunks of multicolored hair, and drops crimson blood were left in their wake as they arced through the sky towards a thick collection of the Red Court along the western edge of our forces.

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. What do I do? I thought frantically to myself, my eyes darting around in my head in a panic as I tried to think of and execute a rescue plan in the space of a second. The horn on my head had been charged and glowing with pent up energy since the moment Rainbow broke through the cloud closing in on her friend, but there wasn’t much I could do with it. Much like when the vampires were pursuing Rainbow, they were too far out for me to hit them with any kind of accuracy. Even if I got lucky and hit the cluster with a spell, any magic I could throw that would be strong enough to knock the monsters off of Rainbow, would also be strong enough to burn her to a crisp. There is no worse feeling in the world, than having more power than you know what to do with, and be unable to exercise that power where it actually matters.

“NO!” Twilight screamed, her horn likewise glowing like a flashlight.

Any other words she might have said were drowned out by a sudden deafening, and all too familiar concussive blast. Up until that point, the actions and location of one particular mare had completely missed my mind. Her peculiar brand of assistance had evidently kept her elsewhere, where she would presumably be more useful, at least until we needed her. A pink blur flashed through the air, towards the same location Rainbow and the vampires were about to land in. Pinkie Pie, ever the one for flair, had loaded herself in her trademarked party cannon and fired herself in a shallow arch over the soldiers, her rear hooves only barely clearing the spear tips below her.

“You let go of Dashie!” Pinkie shouted, her forelegs working to grip her oversized pink warhammer and ready it for combat.

The vampires at the soon-to-be landing site saw not only their own coming down with a catch, but also a supposedly flightless earth pony with a large blunt instrument, apparently breaking all laws of nature and soaring through the air to that same spot. Needless to say, they got out of the way, and there was suddenly a semi-large circle of bare grass just outside of our western front.

Pinkie timed her launch damn near perfectly. Rainbow and her captors tumbled into the cleared patch of grass with a loud thud of impact, and less than half a second later, the somewhat crazed pink party pony crashed to a halt right next to them. While the several vampires covering Rainbow Dash started to disentangle themselves from one another, Pinkie took a bipedal fighting stance with her hammer held firmly in her free forelegs, and twisted it around her back in preparation to swing, despite the fact that her skeletal structure shouldn’t have allowed for such a thing.

“GET OFF DASHIE!” she repeated as she swung her hammer in an axe man’s broad horizontal swing. Her hammer connected on the vampires with a sickening crunch that I could easily make out over the rest of the ongoing battle. Multiple black bodies were flung away by the ferocity and the force of the hammer’s swing. After the initial swing, Pinkie struck out again and again, flinging away vampires from her friend with each blow of her hammer. Before long, the last of the vampires that had seized Rainbow were flung back behind their ranks, and there was just Pinkie standing over the still form of a red-stained blue pegasus.

The abundance of vampires that had cleared away to create the landing zone, distracted as they were by the oddness of Pinkie Pie, regained their composure and started charging at the pink mare and her friend. Pinkie’s only response to the sudden onset of impending violence was to raise her hammer high and plant her rear hooves in the ground around Rainbow.

Pinkie’s innate sense immediately kicked in and her weapon swung through the air, responding to stimuli that hadn’t happened yet. The first creature to get too near her barely had time to register what had happened before a very blunt pink surface impacted with its right jaw line, shattering it to splinters of bone in the process, and sent the rest of its body hurtling back out of Pinkie’s comfort zone. Before the first was even a foot away, Pinkie was already planting more carefully measured swings on three other black skinned vampires. Her hammer and her forelegs were moving so fast, that they had become a pink blur in the air around her, a blur that repelled vampires as fast as they presented themselves. Pinkie and her weapon of choice didn’t stop moving for one instant as she protected her friend, not even when the ground in-between them and our nearest soldiers apparently caught fire.

It was difficult to make out through the several soldiers, spears, and vampires in between us and Pinkie, but I could definitely make out the all too familiar flickering lights of fire just behind Pinkie, not only that but the fire was growing. Even as I first saw it, the fire behind Pinkie grew much faster than any natural fire. It rapidly grew until it formed an almost perfect circle of flame, about three feet in diameter.

I immediately reworked the power I was still holding into a form of earth magic that I rarely used. I pictured to earth responding to my will, the ground opening beneath the fire and snuffing it out under as much dirt as I could manage, it was this intent that I made the centerpiece of my spell. That spell did however run the risk of swallowing Pinkie and Rainbow under the crushing rocks and earth as well, but if the only alternative was to watch them burn, then I’d have to risk it.

McCoy, you old fart, your lessons on earth magic better pay off, I thought to myself as I pieced together the last of my spell. With my finished working firmly in mind, I extended my senses back out into the environment and took careful aim at my target. As soon as my wizard senses honed in on the magical fire near Pinkie, I noticed that a few small things seemed off. For one, the vampires not bouncing off Pinkie’s hammer were looking at the fire with as much uncertainty as I was, and the few unicorn vampires present seemed to be actively trying to put it out. Several black pointed horns glowed brightly as a half dome of green energy surrounded the circle of fire in an attempt to deprive it of oxygen, but to no avail. The flames only grew brighter under the shield, and spread to rest against the edges of the dome. Second, and more importantly, a large amount of magic was being pulled from the emotion rich environment around us, and was being funneled to a single point right next to me. I put two and two together and got purple.

Twilight’s face twisted in an open mouthed snarl as she looked on the vampires that dared to threaten her friends. As she used her magic to give form to her will, both her horn and her eyes glowed with a purple so bright, they were almost pure white.

“Not again, I won’t let you,” she growled under her breath, apparently oblivious to the several ponies around us giving her wary looks, me included. “You will not take another from me!” she shouted and released her pent up spell.

A large burst of Twilight’s magic washed against my senses as it went down into the earth and shot towards the sizeable circle of fire, slipping underneath the vampires’ dome along the way. Once it hit, the surface of the circle solidified and began to shake violently, as though it were a pool of boiling water instead of fire. The surface of the pool suddenly broke and two large clawed paws, made of even more solidified flame, reached out of it. The claws seized the edges of the circle and began pulling the rest of its body through the comparatively small portal, a draconic head and chest already free and glowering at the surrounding world. The familiar style of the horns and spikes along its head and neck identified it as the same construct that Twilight had showed me back before the attack on Canterlot.

The unicorn vampires responsible for the shield dome visibly panicked and feed more energy into the shield, causing it to grow to fit around the creature within, even as it pulled more of itself into the world. The dragon finally managed to pull the last of its hind legs and tail free, the circle it emerged from closed shut behind it, and pressed itself against the confines of its dome prison. With a guttural bellow, which sounded more like grinding rocks than any kind of natural roar, the dragon swept its burning claws at the surrounding shield, tearing it to ribbons almost instantly. Twilight’s dragon construct, was freed and ready to carry out the will of its creator.

My eyes widened in fear as the memory of my last encounter with that creature swam to the forefront of my mind. “Twilight, please tell me you worked out the kinks in that thing,” I babbled, already running through possible, and very unlikely to work, strategies to try and prevent the thing from eating either Pinkie or Rainbow.

Twilight’s only response was to smile, close her eyes, and whisper something under her breath while her horn glowed with a dull light. Behind Pinkie, a similar dull glow surrounded the construct’s head before quickly dispersing. The instant its head was clear it bellowed another deafening sound of grinding rocks, and moved to stand in front of the two isolated ponies, with as much fanfare as possible. The construct stood up on its hind legs, adding several feet to its already impressive height, and its great wings flared outward, making it appear even larger.

“I’ve been practicing,” Twilight gasped through heavy breaths. “I learned how to send it instructions. I told it to protect Pinkie and Rainbow at all costs.”

I grinned and looked back at the looming beast. “That should buy them a little time.”

Let me tell you, if a few of the vampires were a little off put by a mysterious circle of fire, then to say they were extremely distracted by the freaking dragon made of solidified flame, would be an understatement. The vampires that had been harassing Pinkie and Rainbow, had completely forgotten about their prey, and instead focused on the more threatening issue before them. The same unicorn vampires that had tried to restrain the construct began firing small blasts of energy into it. Far from causing any actual damage, the spells only seemed to infuriate the dragon as they very slightly disrupted the magic holding its form together. A few black shapes warily approached the living embodiment of fire, and took experimental swipes and jabs to test the constructs responses. In most of the cases, getting near the dragon was the last mistake they made.

Twilight’s construct watched the vampires’ movements carefully, and responded with vicious swipes and bites. A few of the Red Court worked together to try and outmaneuver the creature. One would swipe black talons to get the dragon’s attention, and then backpedal away while others reached in to rake against its exposed back, keeping the construct on the defensive and always turning. Once several of the vampires were positioned on either side of the dragon, the two groups rushed forward to pincer the elemental between them, several of the vampires actually passing right next to Pinkie and Rainbow in the process. While Twilight’s construct didn’t have Pinkie’s reflexes, it did have other useful traits.

Sensing the pincer coming, the dragon turned to fully face one of the charging groups, and swept razor tipped flaming claws in a wide arc just as they came within reaching distance. The vampires immediately behind those leading the first group skidded to a halt as draconic claws sliced cleanly through the throats of those unfortunate enough to be in front. Said unfortunate vampires merely slumped bonelessly to the ground. Fire erupted from the cuts caused by the dragon and spread to consume the rest of the limp vampires. On the other side, the second group of the pincer moved in for the kill on the dragon’s very exposed back, and got a very good look at the thing’s tail. The construct used its tail as a baseball bat and slammed it into those behind it with as much force as it could muster, sending several of the creatures hurtling aimlessly away, and in a few cases, igniting the would be assassins.

After their failed assault, the vampires quickly backpedaled a safe distance away, watching and waiting for an opening. Well, all but one anyway. One of the few from the second group not nursing a concussion or severe burns decided that he would play hero to his Red Court brethren, and slay the mighty dragon on his own. This ingenious creature chose to do this in the same manner as the pegasi vampires above, which is to say, he latched himself onto the being of solidified fire and held on for dear life. Its screams didn’t last long.

While a moderately sized dragon burning and pounding vampires into giblets was all kinds of satisfying in itself, it was only a part of the construct’s actual purpose. Thanks to the dragon, Pinkie received a much needed breather, as the near constant use of her impressive talent was apparently pushing her to her limit. The head of her hammer sat on the ground by her rear hooves and she leaned against the shaft of the weapon, taking deep breaths to steady herself. I did note with some interest that hooves of Pinkie’s forelegs never strayed too far from the grips along the hammer’s handle. Even more importantly than Pinkie’s rest, Twilight’s intervention allowed for another pony to catch up.

Fluttershy, having dropped off her previous patient, flew over the relatively thin band of vampires separating her friends from reinforcements, and touched down right next to Rainbow. Wasting no time, Fluttershy immediately looked over Rainbow and her wounds, forcing Pinkie to move her hind legs away for the first time since taking that stance. Fluttershy and Pinkie exchanged only a few hushed words as the medic pressed several heavy duty patches over the injured pegasus, not seeking to treat right away, but rather to get her stable enough to move. The vampires surrounding them, finally noticed the triage taking place, and howled and snarled at the yellow pegasus, but unwilling to pounce on them for fear of getting too near the construct still standing guard. Fluttershy winced slightly at the creatures’ sounds, but never took her eyes or hooves away from her patient. After a brief few seconds, Fluttershy finished applying her bandages to Rainbows wounds, either that or she just ran out, and stepped over to pick up her friend. Carefully working her hooves around Rainbow’s barrel, Fluttershy brought her wings down with as much force as the shy pegasus could manage. Any worry or fear on the medic’s face was whipped away and replaced with strain as she fought for every inch of altitude.

Once she swept up over the heads of the soldiers, I could finally get a good look at Rainbow. The vast majority of Rainbow’s body was hidden behind large white squares of cloth that Fluttershy had literally slapped on as a temporary Band-Aid. Dash’s wings, the vast majority of her barrel, and throat were all hidden under those patches, and what I could see wasn’t good. Rainbow’s armor was simply gone, there were a few scraps of linen left dangling at the ends of her hooves, but that was it. Almost every part of her exposed face and limbs, were covered in long vicious cuts made by vampire claws. There was very little blue fur left for us to see, what wasn’t covered by white bandages, was painted crimson with her blood. I focused more intently on Rainbow, desperately looking for some signs of life. I noticed that Fluttershy had swabbed around Rainbow’s eyes clean them off real quick, and in doing so cleaned over the opening a gash just under her left eye, a gash that was still bleeding slightly. If she was still bleeding, that meant her heart was still beating. The fact that Rainbow was alive at all was nothing less than a miracle, but whatever happened to her next would be up to Fluttershy and the other medics.

With Rainbow back in friendly hooves and her job done, Pinkie decided that it was time to back out of the situation. Pinkie moved her hooves around and, I’m totally serious here, somehow crammed her entire oversized hammer into her poofy pink tail. I didn’t even bother to stop and question it; I learned that lesson long ago. The breaking of physics and weight distribution laws aside, once her forelegs freed again, Pinkie abruptly turned on the spot, tensed up her hind legs, and with all the elegance of a gypsy showgirl, began backflipping her way to safety. Pinkie’s individual leaps carried her as high up as Fluttershy was in the air, and she was even pausing mid-jump to presumably whisper words of comfort to Rainbow or Fluttershy. The final leap before securely putting her in friendly territory brought Pinkie down in the middle of the vampires just outside of our forces’ reach. Sensing what was about to happen, Pinkie twisted around in midair as she came down, and landed with the full force of her impact being brought down on the spine of some clueless vampire. Before the other vampires could figure out what had just happened, or why their friend was suddenly on the ground, Pinkie had bounced back up for her final backflip that landed her among the armored hooves of our soldiers. It was an odd sight to behold, to say the least.

Once it saw that both subjects of its programming were moving away, Twilight’s construct reared up and again flared its wings out into the sky. The encircling vampires immediately retreated a few feet, fearing that they were about to become another victim to the dragon’s wrath, which was a good call on their part. The dragon flapped its wings down and took off into the sky after Fluttershy, the location of its take off point was set aflame for several feet in all directions because of the dragon’s back draft. Thanks to the dragon technically not having a physical mass, it accelerated to catch up to Fluttershy and Rainbow remarkably fast, and left a faint trail of black smoke in the air behind it. I watched happily as they retreated to safety, and then turned my attention back to the gloomy vampires that had to watch their prey escape.

My turn, I thought as I again reworked the magic I still held on standby. Now that the field of targets was clear and I didn’t have to worry about potentially harming my friends, I felt that some payback of my own was in order. Hey, if Twilight got to, then so do I.

I shouted a short battle cry and felt my pent up magic explode outward from my spiraled horn. Five different balls of flame soared through the sky, and rained down upon the same creatures that had captured my friends. I watched with a sense of grim satisfaction as the orbs impacted against the vampires, and then detonated, spraying sheets of fire everywhere like a Molotov cocktail. Each individual blast wasn’t too powerful, and was probably only lethal if it impacted a vampire directly, but the fire did its job nicely. The crowd of black skinned creatures bumped against each other in confusion and pain as they tried desperately to put out the several small fires on their own bodies, or on their comrades’.

“Not that I’m complaining, but was that necessary?” Twilight asked, with a look of satisfaction similar to my own mirrored on her face.

I chuckled and flashed the mare a grin, “It made me feel better, so yes, I like to think it was.”

Twilight smiled and tracked Fluttershy’s movements until she and Rainbow touched down in the relative safety of the medics’ pavilion. “Well they’re safe now. Fluttershy will makes sure nothing bad happens to Rainbow,” she stated as though that were simple fact, still slightly out of breath from her exertions in creating the dragon construct. Twilight took one last steadying breath and turned back towards the front line. “Harry, Fluttershy is doing her job, we need to do ours. The Princesses need our… Um, Harry, I’ve been trying to read up on military strategies, but what are they doing?” she asked, casting an odd look at the nearest vampires beyond our spears.

My brow furrowed in confusion and my ears twisted around at every individual sound as I turned to look at whatever had given Twilight cause for worry. I only found more snarling black skinned vampires. Just beyond our line of armored ponies, the vampires snarled, howled, bared their fangs, and swiped their claws at the open air in our direction. It was a disturbing sight sure, but so long as they couldn’t set a claw on me or mine, I wasn’t sure what Twilight was talking about.

“They’re not attacking,” Applejack offered after a couple of seconds of silence. “Why aren’t they attacking?”

I swept my eyes back and forth across the Red Court forces at Applejack’s words, and sure enough, she was right. The sea of black bodies in front of us was just sitting there and making nasty faces at us. They swiped their claws and growled, but made no effort to get past the spears as they had been since the fight began. I craned my head around to get a look at the rest of our entrenched forces, and it was the same everywhere I looked. Lots and lots of snarling vampires, but no combat, even the vampire unicorns had stopped raining their spells down on us.

“What’s going on?” Rarity asked, confusion heavy in her voice and across her face. “Are they surrendering?”

“The Red Court doesn’t surrender, they bide time,” I said almost absentmindedly. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one b-” My voice caught in my throat, as something simply and suddenly altered the thought process of my mind.

Fear, pain, and a sense of complete and simple wrongness washed over me for no apparent reason. My mind was screaming at me that something was wrong, I can’t really explain any further than that, I just knew on some instinctual level that something horribly wrong was happening. Combat and death, while terrible and can spawn some of the nastiest monsters imaginable, are for the most part natural occurrences that happen almost every day. Whatever I was sensing felt like it was breaking the very nature of reality, like something was happening that shouldn’t have even been possible.

My heart leapt up into my throat and my blood ran cold as rational thought was replaced with an urgent need to move. I frantically swept my eyes around in search for the source of my unease, but only saw more terrified ponies. All around me, hardened soldiers outfitted with the thickest barding and sharpest spears Canterlot had to offer, danced nervously in place and were likewise searching the environment. It wasn’t only the unicorns either. Whatever was playing merry hell with my mind was also being picked up by the earth ponies forming our front line and the pegasi flying around above us; the same juggernauts that broke the vampires’ initial assault without batting an eye, were suddenly shaking in their boots.

That’s when I heard it. Coming from directly in front of us, a loud shrill scream pierced through the night and crashed against me like a tidal wave. The tone filled my muscles with nervous energy and caused me to tense uncontrollably. Every fiber of my being told me to get to whatever was making that scream, and fix it, because it was a scream that shouldn’t have happened and should never happen. So strong was my desire that I had to fight very hard not to throw myself into the vampires, just because I’d be that much closer to the origin of that scream. That scream was wrong in every sense of the word. Even the world around us seemed to reject it. The wind howled, leaves swirled around in mini-tornadoes, and even the trees creaked and leaned over to shake their limbs in the direction of the scream had come from.

Princess Celestia had made that scream. I had no real solid evidence to make this claim, but in the back of my mind I knew it was true. I just knew that Princess Celestia was in pain, a lot of it.

“Celestia!” Twilight cried out from right beside me, her expression was one of pure desperation. Her pupils had turned to pinpricks and her ears plastered themselves to the sides of her skull.

The sea of the Red Court had apparently been waiting for this signal and surged forward in one massive push. Once again, black bodies and gleaming claws attempted to knock aside, climb over, or simply push through our defenses. The soldiers and guardsponies attempted to steady their spears, and our unicorns fired spell after spell into the vampire ranks, albeit shakily, their resolve undermined somewhat by Celestia’s scream. The one major difference I could pinpoint through my still pounding heart was that the vampires seemed to be moving around to the sides of our group. The number of Red Court directly between us and the source of the scream had thinned significantly, I could even clearly see the individual pieces of grass on the opposite side of the vampires in front of me.

All of this information was completely missed by Twilight however. Evidently, whatever had happened in my head when I heard that scream was happening in hers as well, but to a much greater degree. Twilight pushed and shoved her way to the front line, directly behind the juggernauts and Michael. Once she reached the front line she began trying to look in-between the soldiers and vampires, as though she was going to spot her mentor in the distance somewhere. I followed after her, fearing what she might do if her desperation proved too much. Shortly after I reached her, another high pitched scream overpowered the sounds of combat and gave my legs plenty of nervous energy.

“Celestia, I’m coming!” Twilight screamed back into the night, and rammed power into her horn.

Before I could do anything to stop her, Twilight vanished in a flash of purple light and reappeared just outside of the encompassing sea of vampires.

“Twilight, no wait!” I cried after her, but she had already galloped off towards where Celestia’s screams had come from. Abandoning my role in the fight, I leapt forward after Twilight. My horn was already glowing like a flashlight as I ducked in-between Michael and the pony to his left.

“Arry? Aht are ou oin?” Michael tried to speak through the handle of Amorracious. I paid him no mind and instead turned my horn to aim at the vampires between me and Twilight.

“GET OUT OF MY WAY!” I roared and let my pent up energy fly from me. A powerful wave of pure force exploded from my horn and scattered the relatively thin line of vampires in front of me, creating a hole in the chaos just large enough for me to squeeze through. Wasting no time, I launched myself forward and gave chase after Twilight, fear almost giving me the speed of a pegasus.

As I blew past their line, Michael and several of the more heavily armored soldiers tried to follow suit, but were cut off by the vampires resurging and closing the hole I made in their ranks. The instant I made it through, the vampires evidently noticed the weakness and their numbers shifted again to reinforce that particular area. So unless there was a drastic change in the combat and we broke their ranks, I wasn’t likely to get reinforcements. Oddly enough though, none of the Red Court seemed to care, or even really notice the two unicorns galloping through grassy plains, presumably headed for their main base of operations. I decided not to buck a gift vampire in the teeth and continued chasing after Twilight.

“Harry!” Michael shouted into the night after me.

I paused for a brief moment at his words and turned back around at the scene unfolding behind me. Now that I had a second to take stock, I could see that the fight seemed fairly evenly matched. Despite everything we had done, the Red Court’s numbers were still formidable and, as solidly entrenched as we were, they had our army trapped. The flood of vampires encircling our troops couldn’t get the footing they needed to press forward into our soldiers and place the proverbial noose around our neck. But neither could we make the necessary push to pierce their encircling forces.

Vampires pressed themselves in as close as they could get with our spear wall still in the way. Sometimes they were driven back by a combination of spears and conjured shields, and sometimes they broke through and managed to take a soldier or two. The unicorns of the Royal Guard had their work cut out for them and were responsible for the majority of the many failed attacks. I tried to get a good look at the girls I knew were still scattered amongst the soldiers, but they were hidden in all the insanity before me. Several vampire pegasi fell out of the sky and cratered just outside of their encircling line, one of them landed and skidded to a halt just a few feet from me. I initially thought they went down from bolts or some other projectile, but the thick coating of familiar dark ice around them suggested otherwise.

On one side, I had an epic battle between the best Canterlot had to offer versus a horde of creatures that would see all of Equestria enslaved, transformed, or killed. A battle that looked like it could be decided by the drop of a coin, and if placed in the right spot at the right time, my power could very well turn it to our favor. On the other side, I had Twilight racing along to free Celestia, which meant that she’d likely be squaring off against the Red King and any of his cronies, alone.

I didn’t even shoot Michael and the others a second glance as I turned back around and chased after Twilight’s retreating form. I galloped as fast as I could down the grassy plains for almost a good full minute before I finally came across an actual landmark. Out of the haziness of the night, a short structure of some sort came into view. From what I could make out at a distance, only two main parts were exposed to the night air. The most noticeable, was a large pile of rubble that at one point may have been a grand statue. Just in front of this statue was a set of wide stone stairs that led down into some other structure just below the surface of the earth. As I neared the stairs, I paused to look at the rubble more closely. I had been right in assuming that it used to be a statue, but more interestingly, the intact pieces of the statue matched the description of what Twilight had told me of Luna’s alter ego.

I was broken from my reverie by the loud thunking of hooves on the stone steps below. Berating myself for the lapse in judgment, I shot down the stairs as quickly as I dared, making carefully placed steps as I went. Four legs, plus fast movement, plus going down stairs does not equal anything good.

Before long I reached the bottom of the staircase and saw that it opened up into a large, but curiously mostly unlit stone room. The only portion of the room that had any light whatsoever was the columned area directly in front of the staircase, everything to either side was completely shrouded in pitch blackness. From what I could tell, the entire structure appeared to be made of stone, the floor, ceiling, and walls all were made out of the same yellowish grey stone. Not only that, but the room was massive, from staircase to far wall, the room spanned around eighty feet. Aside from the limited visual space, a horrible stench of decaying flesh permeated the room, it was almost bad enough to make retch on the spot. But that all didn’t really matter so much as what was happening in the lit portion of the room.

Twilight stood in front of the staircase entrance with her hooves planted in the stone beneath her, far across from her on the opposite side of the room, stood the Red King. I could tell the moment I entered the room, that wasn’t an illusion or some puppet, that was the true blue in the flesh monster that had been plaguing Equestria. He stood slightly above us on a small dais, his navy blue coat and blood red mane proudly on display as he sneered down at us. His power was immense, just from being in the same room with him I could feel his mere essence bearing down on us, like one or two additional layers of gravity being placed on my body.

“Release Celestia right now!” Twilight shouted and launched a lance of purple energy up at her opponent.

The Red King actually laughed at Twilight’s attack, and shot his own beam of pitch black energy down to meet it. Twilight’s and the Red King’s spells met in midair and locked into each other, forming a link between the two, with the link colored purple on one half and black on the other. Almost immediately upon contact, Twilight cried out and was forced to bend her forelegs as she struggled for control over her spell. The black energy of the Red King’s spell sped along the link and was about to overpower the helpless mare.

“No!” I shouted as leapt forward. Given the situation, there honestly wasn’t much I could’ve done to help, so I did the only thing that came to mind. I pressed my side up against Twilight’s to give her some much needed physical support, and then I leaned forward to touch my horn to hers and pour as much of my energy into her spell as I could. What exactly happened after I did that, I doubt I’ll ever really be able to understand.

After our horns touched and I fed her my energy, something odd was triggered in our magic. Instead of my energy just being channeled and used as extra fuel for her spell, the two different energies actually melded together in a way I had never seen before, much less experienced. Even the spell we were fueling, while originally cast by Twilight, had come under my control just as much as hers. I could feel the deep well of magic we had created together and were drawing upon, and it was immense. Somehow, with whatever we had done, the total of our power was far greater than the sum of its parts.

“Harry?” Twilight gasped and looked at me in surprise, her horn twisting slightly but never actually losing contact with mine. I only shrugged in confusion, and let the remainder of the spell play out.

With the new source of energy, the beam of light shooting from our horns changed from Twilight’s usual purple, to an almost pure white. Our white magic stopped the Red Kings energy in its tracks, and slowly, very slowly, began to make it reverse. A massive grin spread across my muzzle as our energy pushed the Red King’s darkness to the halfway point on the connection between us. When it pushed past the halfway point and we became the dominant side, some of the excess energy fed back into us and made my heart leap, or maybe that could’ve been because of the fact that we were suddenly flying. Don’t ask me how, but as whatever power we tapped into continued to grow, Twilight and I became wreathed in that same white energy and began floating about a foot from the floor. I paid it little mind and just refocused on the impossible fact that we were actually overpowering the Red King with a pool of magic that was only continuing to grow. So much power coursed through our bodies I bet that there was nothing Twilight and I couldn’t do. So long as we were together, I felt unstoppable.

But the Red King was stronger still.

Above us the Red King, far from appearing nervous, actually grinned as he watched us push our power to cover three fourths of the connection.

“Interesting,” he said, sounding almost bored with the whole situation, “but this no longer amuses me, and I have work to do.”

With what looked like about the same amount of effort it’d take to lift a pillow, the Red King focused more of his will into our connection, and poured seemingly unending amounts of his power through. Any joyous feelings our combined magic had given me came crashing down around my ears as the strain of maintaining our spell doubled and redoubled every second. The white of the connection between us rapidly fell away as the Red King’s energy pressed forward further and further. It passed the halfway point again, and a dull ringing sounded in my ears that grew in intensity the closer his magic got. At nearly a foot away the combined pain of maintaining our spell and a screeching tone akin to nails on a chalkboard, sounding off inside my ear canal, was driving me to the edge of my endurement. Despite our best efforts, his power reached the end of our chain, and touched against our horns. Whatever magic we had tapped into, while considerable, couldn’t stand up to the combined power of the hundreds of lives the Red King must’ve consumed.

The moment his power touched me, a massive hammer of pure will slammed into me and sent me flying backward. The entire right side of my body, from the back of my head down to my flank, crashed into the stone wall behind me. I lost track of time for several seconds as my brain rebooted itself back into working order. When I could again remember where I was, and why lying in a heap on the ground was a bad idea, I got back to my hooves and reexamined the situation.

Across the room, standing on the same raised dais, the Red King grinned a wide smile full of pointed teeth as he examined his capture. Beside him Twilight floated in midair, wrapped in his telekinetic grip and completely at his mercy. She bucked and struggled, but couldn’t tear herself free.

“Twilight!” I shouted and tried to charge at the pair, only for my limbs to be weighted down with lead and rooted me to the spot.

“Let me go, you monster!” Twilight shouted as she continued to struggle.

Completely ignoring her yelling, the Red King turned back to smile down at me, even as I tried my very best to murder him with my gaze.

“An interesting tidbit, Dresden,” he said in a perfectly calm and collected tone, like he was simply discussing something with a dear friend, “Did you know that Celestia and Luna are more connected to this land and its ponies than most would have you believe?” He offered me a small smile and waited for a response. I only glared back up at the creature, trying desperately to put together a working plan to get Twilight and I out of there. “It’s a kind of self defense mechanism,” he continued on when I didn’t answer. “For instance, when one of the princesses screams out in pain, it acts as a summons to all ponies that are close enough to hear it.” The Red King turned his hungry gaze on Twilight, “The more important the princess is to the pony, the more powerful the summons. I was hoping that Celestia’s personal protégé would come. She has been annoyingly stalwart against my mental attacks.” He turned his gloating eyes back over to me, “Tell me, did you feel the call too? Did you feel the uncontrollable urge to protect your princess?”

I sinking feeling hit my gut as I processed that information. Celestia was in fact an immortal demigod, and would of course have the type of mental fortitude you’d expect from such a being. The Red King needed to break her mind to steal her power, but he was very unlikely to accomplish such a feat with only a mortal’s willpower, if it was even possible at all. So he would need something to undermine her strength, namely a loved one she cared about almost as much as her own sister, such as her personal protégé. That all added up nicely, but it still left one glaring issue.

“That’s it? That’s what this is about?” I snarled back. “You brought us here and started the warzone above us, just to get your claws on Twilight?”

“Not quite, Dresden,” he said, his sneer becoming an irritated frown. “The princesses’ connection goes both ways. Just as you can feel her distress, she too can feel yours. That took a lot of, ‘experimentation’ to find out.” His sneer plastered itself back across his large muzzle. “And how many ponies are up there, fighting and dying for their princess right now? Ms. Sparkle here will just make the process go much quicker.”

My blood turned to ice at those words. If he was right, then Celestia was experiencing the exact same nerve-wracking psychosis I felt earlier, only she wasn’t feeling it from one pony, she was feeling it from all of us. Such a constant barrage of mental anguish, on top of whatever the Red King had planned, could possibly destroy even the mind of a demigod. My face went blank as I tried and failed to think of some way out of the situation, some way to fix everything that had gone wrong, but I couldn’t. The Red King had planned out every step in his favor and was just too powerful. There wasn’t anything I could do against him, not by myself anyway.

Apparently satisfied that he had destroyed the last vestiges of hope I had possessed, the Red King straightened himself up, and then offered me a curt bow. “At any rate, thank you for the delivery, Dresden. Your aid to the Red Court will be documented in the history books.”

With another flash of dark magic from his horn, the shadows on either side of the room abruptly fell away and swept over to sink into the Red King’s coat, revealing what was waiting for me in the darkness. The room was as wide as it was long, about eighty feet in either direction, and was largely used as a dump site. Corpses, hundreds of them, were piled all along either wall to my side, some of them were captured soldiers or scouts, some of them were just common citizens. They ranged from all kinds of ponies imaginable, there were unicorns, pegasi, earth ponies, stallions, mares, and my muscles clenched with rage as I saw more than a few foals as well. There were some that looked like fresh kills, still bloodied and staring off into space with milky eyes, while other looked like they had been picked to the bone, their flesh eaten long ago.

I pulled a double take as I saw movement on the corpse piles. What I initially thought were just more bodies, were in fact vampires that had perched themselves there, watching our match against the Red King with interest. My eyes shifted around the room, I counted several dozen of the black skinned creatures at least.

“Kill the unicorn,” he ordered to the room at large, “and do so quietly. I do not want to be disturbed.” With that said he turned around and moved for the door directly opposite the staircase I came down.

Twilight never stopped struggling against her captor, she just shook and bucked more and more violently as he went on. “No! Let me go!” she screamed as they neared the doorway and actually managed to place a good buck against the Red King’s left cheek. “Harry!”

The Red King paused mid-step and brought a hoof up to rub against the spot Twilight had struck. “You ponies are beginning to irritate me,” he growled and tightened his telekinetic grip around Twilight. “At least humans have the common decency to give up when they’ve already lost!”

At the final word, the Red King held Twilight higher in the air, and then brought her down to slam her against the wall next to the doorframe. At the moment of impact, a loud crack echoed throughout the room, and Twilight went completely limp.

“No!” I shouted and struggled against the force the Red King was still using to hold my legs in place.

He ignored my outcry and stepped through the open doorway, Twilight’s limp form floating in the air behind him. The door glowed with his dark energy before it closed behind them, blocking Twilight from my view, and leaving me alone in a room full of monsters.

Rasping laughter met my twitching ears as the vampires slowly crawled down from their perches and moved to encircle me. Before long, I was surrounded by black bodies and gleaming white fangs. If given a moment, I could potentially bring to bear enough power to decimate some of the vampires, maybe even a dozen of them if I got really lucky. But there was no way I’d be able to defend myself against the several dozen of them all around me. They’d be feasting before I could get my second spell off. I had no other choice; I gathered together my will and my power for my last ‘Hail Mary’.

“You can’t have her,” I mumbled under my breath.

The rasping laughter returned and echoed all around me.

My spell began to take shape in my mind. “Not again, never again.”

The vampires laughed even harder, exposing every single one of their ridiculously pointed teeth.

Please, God, King, Luna, Celestia, please let this work, I thought as I finished the mental preparations for my deceptively simple spell. Once I was done, I looked back up and into the gleeful shining black eyes of dozens of Red Court vampires.

I drew in a deep breath and then bellowed, “I won’t let you take her!”