Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 26 — Somewhere Far Beyond

Singing.

It had a way of helping keep up morale. Morale was important if you had to spend most of the last three days on trains, especially when you had to climb up a mountain with an ass still sore from sitting. It also helped a great deal with the cold, the scary animals, the thought that maybe what you saw as green everypony else saw as red, and the unexpected crowd standing before the little bridge to Snechta’s mountain fastness.

“Here he comes; here come Speed Jericho, yeah,” I singsonged, watching my breath form those cool little clouds that kids used to pretend they were smoking. Because lung cancer was cool. “He will show up, save the day, choose not to bang the girl because he refuses to take sexual advantage of emotionally troubled victims, then march into the sunset. Whooooa, but he’ll’ve also stolen your ox.”

“Ywcjidh cwm Mrinjidh!” I heard a mare’s voice shouting, sounding amplified like Duke Elkington through his speakers he had in Songnam. “Sisters and brothers,” she went on. “Many of you are Mijôri, and many of you are from Equestria, so I will speak the most understood tongue for you this day.”

Looking past the really big crowd, I couldn’t see who was speaking. But by the voice, I knew it was Snechta. She was probably up to no good, trying to extort money from people, as corrupt religious ponies were wont to do. Plus, Snechta was a crazy pony. But then, who was I to judge?

“The Goddess Chêngrêla, now the one true deity as she is all who is left, has allowed me to spread her word to those without it. Many of you are tired, disillusioned, and have lost your way in this cruel life.

I stepped into the crowd, pushing my way through. All of these ponies, bundled up in thick coats, were actually dressed as if they cared about nudity. While I doubted any of them wore underwear, an invention I was sure they simply didn’t possess in Equestria, it was a stepping stone on the road to dressing like civilized beings. Many of the ponies here had that weird look of being made of a crystalline glass, but as Snechta had said, many didn’t look like that.

From in the crowd, a stallion looked back at me with red eyes that reminded me of Cards. Good ol’ Cards. She was probably choking to death on a spoon right now! But when the stallion and I locked eyes—that was all that I could see of him—he ducked deeper into the crowd.

“I know what that’s like, sisters and brothers, to have nothing in this cruel world,” Snechta went on. “Not long ago, I was little more than a beggar, a shameless mare starving on the streets, wishing for so much as a loaf of bread. One day, as I was sitting in the cold, staring at the ribs poking out from my stomach, with King Sombra ruling in Tol-Dolborath, two young stallions—colts, really—came up to me.”

A part of me wanted to shout “Fire” and then punch somepony in the hopes of starting a riot. Lord knew it’d be more fun than Snechta trying to scam ponies out of money so she could achieve her dream of… I didn’t know—building a statue of herself out of chocolate that she could sexually molest, because the only thing that could turn her on were lifelike chocolate statues.

Snechta took a breath, rubbing her eyes. “One of them hit me across the face with a rock, nearly taking my eye out. The other bucked me in ribs. Then the first one pinned me down, informing me that they wanted me to scream as they… a-as they…” She sniffled, tearing up. The crowd was silent. “I could feel them both feeling me, touching what they were going to claim as their prize, grasping and squeezing like animals parts of me meant only for the touch of a lover. And I clenched my tearing eyes shut; I would not scream or cry for them, as it was what they wanted.” She swallowed. “That was when the empire was frozen in time. That was what my life was for over a thousands years: tear-strewn eyes clenched, teeth gritted, two stallions grabbing me so hard that I bruised. Time ceased to me. There was only that.

“And when time resumed, it had been an eon. When time resumed, I no longer felt them there. I felt sore, but almost unharmed. Turning around in the little alley I called home, I saw them there, against the wall. They had been brutally crucified to death, as in the stories of the Ełd. Their blood drained down across their bodies, onto the ground, and formed a holy symbol. At its center was a dying raven chick with three eyes, the mark of a beast tormented by Sombra’s dark glass.”

“No passing,” a stocky crystal stallion with iron armor and a mace at his side told me. He, alongside numerous others, formed almost a phalanx at the head of the hill, separating the crowd from the almost sobbing Snechta.

Oh, boo hoo, I thought derisively at Snechta. You almost get raped, and everyone behaves as if it’s a tragedy. I almost get raped, and they tell me it’s because I dress like a slut. Why don’t ponies cry for me?

One, because you don’t tell ponies you almost got raped. Usually. And two, because you’re a child killer.

“That’s nice,” I said to the stallion. “Now let me through.”

“No.”

There was silence, save for the distant call of a raven. “Hey,” I asked trying to duck around him, “how’s your health plan?” His response was to try to punch the grin off my face and shove me back.

“Apparently, it’s great!” I barked, slugging him in an exposed area of the armor: the neck. Seriously, what was with this continent’s armor and not protecting the neck? Anypony with a keen aim could easily shoot an arrow or punch a hoof straight into the gaps. So, the guard went down to the ground, and I calmly stepped past him.

The rest of the phalanx saw me and charged. “I’m so glad at least Snechta’s church has great employee healthcare, but how about dental?” I hit a guy in the mouth with the point of my hoof. He recoiled back into his friend. “Free trips to the eye doctors?” I asked, striking another right between the eyes. The rest of the phalanx refused to get near me; instead, they drew their weapons, all maces, and surrounded me. “Hey, does Snechta provide free trips to the local proctologist? Because I get the feeling that when we’re done here, you’ll—”

“Enough!” Snechta shouted. “What is the meaning of this?”

I straightened up and said in a loud of a loud voice, “I come in the name of Snechta, High Priestess, she of Côrint, and will present to her the book Calêrhos, as I was bid. I am Jericho Amadeus Faust, he of Teutschland, Champion of Côrint, and I come as myself; you will let me pass!”

Everypony started back. I heard many whispers in tongues I didn’t understand, dialects I couldn’t fathom. “That’s him!” I heard some say in Equestrian I could comprehend. “It’s the Champion!” “I knew I recognized him!” “Lets him pass, you blighters!”

Snechta let out a mirthless laugh. “Are you Łêdjyoni honestly trying to pick a fight with the Champion of Côrint, cwm Tatõłviç Côrintvim? Ces! Ces!”

With fearful haste as if I’d turn their genitals into spiders, the armored stallions all stepped away from me, giving me an alley to pass. “Dankeschön,” I said, walking through the little aisle.

“Do you not see?” Snechta said with a flourish. “Chêngrêla brings agents to her true cause from ’round the globe. This here warrior, Champion of Côrint, proven thereby to be the greatest warrior in the world, and he comes from across the world to serve the Goddess.”

I looked over and saw a collection of priestly mares standing to the side, one of whom I recognized. When we locked eyes, I could see in her eyes the urge to curl back into a ball. When Snechta said I came to serve the Goddess, she actually did collapse into a ball, her priestess-sisters immediately trying to help her. Dopey religious cult indeed.

“Sisters and brothers who share of the Crystal Heart, of Cae-Côrdis, hear me, I beg of you,” Snechta said. “Many of you know the legends of Calêrhos, the mythical Doorway of power that Sombra lusted for; many of us know the fables of how the great paladin fell from grace, becoming the tyrant only so recently slain; ye kenn the tales of Cae Cêlyx, too.

“Well,” she said with a winning smile as I took a place standing next to her, “the Witch-Queen Celestia would have stolen from us our heritage, the one text of magic which contains the secrets of the Doorway and how Sombra sealed Cae Cêlyx to keep us from it, the text he locked in his dark library, the text in the library still not open to the public in Tah-Dolborath, the text which Celestia herself spirited away to her own greedy coven in Canterlot. The abnormous crone would sit a-cocke-horse our heritage, taking from us what is ours by birthright.

“But then a great warrior from somewhere far beyond came to me. He spoke of needing help, and in exchange for using the Gift of Chêngrêla to heal him, he promised me our birthright anon. And so returns he, Tatõł Côrintvim, beclothed as a knight of the East, carrying the book both doorway and key.”

Senchta smiled, motioning for the crowd to come on over. “But let us not stand out here in the cold. Inside the temple it is warm and bright, for crystal nights are dark and full of terrors.”

I allowed for everyone else to enter the temple before I did. Why? Couldn’t say. Mayhap I was simply enjoying the cold as I bobbed my head and sang songs that I’d just made up. “Oh, and if you try to strip me down, I’ll kick you in the face!” Probably something like that. In any case, the two guards closed the great wooden doors at the end of the bridge as soon as I’d entered the mountain.

The interior of the temple greeted me with a gust of warmth that radiated from both everywhere and nowhere. To my sides were many large racks for hanging coats, all space nearly taken, as the ponies I could see further in there were all naked. Except for one crystal stallion in a tophat. I didn’t know who he was, but he was my favorite.

Opting to keep my hat, duster, and whatnot still on, I walked past the racks. A few ponies milled about the foyer by the statue of the robed mare with glowing eyes and the snake-like tail coming out from the bottom of her robes, but I could see that the majority were up the large stone staircase. So up I went into the large rotunda-like room centered around a small lake with a white tree at its heart.

This room was even warmer than the last, and here far more ponies fiddled around, chatted, or partially explored parts of the temple that overlooked the lake. Up in the rooms that resembled second-story apartments, that is. Snechta had lain out a buffet table on either side of the room, each table displaying foods the likes of which I’d never seen.

I went up to the nearest table and picked up a single unit of the most edible-looking substance: a blueish-purple berry that looked to be made of glass. Putting in my mouth, I very slowly bit down on it; the last thing I wanted right now was a mouthful of glass shards, although the resulting cuts wouldn’t get infected because I knew the ins and outs of proper oral hygiene. Kids, take note. But, like the bodies of the crystal ponies, the berry was flesh.

And it was flesh that neatly burst when I applied just enough pressure to it.

I recoiled back, dazed. If anypony had been looking at my face, they easily could have mistaken me for having died then and there, and thought that the rest of my body just hadn’t gotten the memo. A single word, a single exclamation, ran through my mind and refused to leave.

Sweet!

In all my years across the world’s continents, across all the foods and drinks offered to me or that I stole, I had never tasted something so supernaturally sugary.

Sweet!

Suddenly, I couldn’t understand why all of the crystal ponies weren’t all fat and on a fast track to diabetes. This was the kind of delicious sugary goodness that could collapse nations, and had to be kept out of the hooves of proletariat. In a world with such sugary goodness, I could easily predict that the Crystal Empire had never known a problem with illicit drugs.

Sweet!

I reached forwards, shoveling hooffuls of the berries into my mouth until my cheeks were fat and puffy and my mouth couldn’t close. It was like I was suddenly the world’s sexiest squirrel, hiding my nuts for the winter. But first, I had to find a tree to scamper up and hide. Dammit! If only ponies had little squirrel hands to aid us in climbing trees to store our nuts! Hooves were clearly a titanic design oversight on evolution’s part.

An arm wrapped around my shoulder as somepony embraced me in a hug from the side. I turned, muttering something that sounded like “Schlaw schlaw schlaw?” as I saw Snechta burying her face in my neck.

“There you are,” she sighed almost longingly. Snechta moved to kiss me on the cheek, but she had to stand on her tippy-hooves to get there. As soon as she did, she stopped, and burst out laughing. “Oh dear, is this your first time eating canjic syłwajic? Crystal berries?”

“Darest thou at me to laugh? Then thou mustst perish!” Or so I tried to say. What what out was more like a garbled stream of various forms of “Agh, arh, argh.”

Snechta snickered, patting my squirrel-like cheek. “Yeah, that tends to happen when folks first partake of the crystal berry. It only grows around here, and it’s the main thing that does grow around here, since it’s a major cash crop, and one of the few things we have that keeps our economy from imploding. Belike you should refrain from them for the time, lest you can’t help yourself and gorge yourself further.”

If I had a proper tail, it would have been between my legs as I whimpered in agreement. It wasn’t easy to take myself away from the table, but take myself away from it I did, trying to chew the berries the whole while.

“Come,” Snechta said, taking my hoof and tugging gently. I allowed her to lead me across the tan tiles the rotunda, still trying to chew the berries, getting a buzz in my head from the sugar. She took me up a set of stairs there that two armored stallion were standing guards by. They shot me dirty looks, like how a land cow looks at a dolphin, as they watched Snechta lead me up.

At the top of the stairs was a rather new-looking wooden door that Snechta closed behind us. The room here had a large window—with actual glass!—looking out at the rotunda. There was a large oaken desk with a cozy chair, the desktop itself decorated with a few random odds and ends, such as an inkwell, feather pen, and some parchment. Further on was a doorway leading into a rather large bedroom.

“Show it to me,” she demanded.

As I finished swallowing the berries, my blood sugar increasing to near-lethal levels, I said, “Yeah, sure, sure.” I reached into my pack and took out the book. Her eyes widened and widened until I was sure they would hilariously fall out of their sockets, forcing her to roll around the ground, screaming in pain. Somehow, that didn’t happen; Snechta just stared at the book like it made her unbelievably horny in all the worst, most rapetastic ways.

“Uh, are you okay?” I asked, moving the book around and watching her eyes follow it.

“Huh? Ñ-ñar, I am well…” she replied in the voice of somepony telling their spouse that they were awake in order to get five more minutes of shuteye.

Quickly, I moved the book up and down, then it circles, grinning as her silvern eyes danced for me. “Okay, that’s enough out of you,” I said. “Stop leering at it like a rockcat about to pounce upon and then sodomize a small deer. It’s unbecoming.”

Snechta blinked, then rubbed her eyes. “Ugh, belike you’re right, Jericho.”

“Belike? What does that mean?”

She sighed. “It means ‘perhaps’, Jericho. Now, would you please give me the book? With it, I can bring Cae Cêlyx back to life, and use it to heal you. But first I need the book.”

I hesitated. “Pardon me for asking, but what exactly is in this book that you seem so keen on? You know, the stuff other than what could help me?”

Snechta shot me an ‘are you serious?’ look. “It is merely the key to a broken doorway that the Cadance-usurper has locked away from us crystalfolk because Princess Celestia dislikes it. I require the precise rituals and incantations of the book to truly service my folken as High Priestess, and I need it to destroy the last traces of King Sombra’s corruption. He feared the Gift, Cae Cêlyx, and the key to resurrecting it is in this book. The book, too, holds the sum of our knowledge regarding Tah-Dolborath and the magic of those who built it.”

“You mean, the crystal ponies didn’t build the Crystal Castle?”

“No,” she groaned. “The Goddess merely led our ancestors to the ancient tower and the Crystal Heart, which had been built by the… by the, uh… the Old Peoples.”

“Die Antiker,” I muttered. “Hmm. Here.” I held the book out to her, and she greedily snatched it from me.

“Look, I understand your suspicions,” Snechta told me in a tone meant to be reassuring but which only made me think of spiders made of spikes, “but it is all part of the Goddess’ plan, and she is a loving Goddess.”

I grunted. “Where I am from, thoughts of fate and destiny—” and Oz, a voice reminded “—are considered almost heretical. We say that God, the Father, grants us free will. Therefore, there can be no fate, no predestination, for there is also such thing as sin and evil. The concept of sin is incompatible with the idea of predestination for the simple fact that if you have no free will yet are punished for sin, that sin was something God commanded you to do, and therefore being punished for it would mean God is a completely arbitrary psychopath. We mortals on this Earth are the masters of our own Oz.” I blinked. “Our own destiny, I mean.”

Snechta rolled her eyes. “Look, philosophy is nice and all, but there’s a time and a place for it, and it is not here, so—”

Somepony knocked on the front door. Hard. “Snechta! Snechta!”

“Lo?” she snapped in the tones of somepony who will stab someone in the mouth if they ask her another question. They knocked harder on the door, and, groaning, Snechta went to it. The mare standing at the door was panting hard, her mane a mess, eyes wild. She grabbed Snechta, said something in Mijôra, and Snechta paled.

“Uh, excuse me,” Snechta said. She bolted out of the room, slamming the door shut behind me.

I went over to the window to see what I could see. Snechta and the mare, plus a trio of guards, ran out into the main foyer. My guess? Zombies. But not just any zombies. Zombies who only craved pickled pony patooties.

Of course, that was a problem my sword and I could solve later. But first and formally foremost, there was a desk to sift through and loot! Sitting in Snechta’s chair, I opened a drawer, pocketed a paperclip, but found nothing else of want. Hey, it was my duty as an adventurer to be a part-time kleptomaniac. More than once, I’d gone into a house, grabbed everything that wasn’t nailed down, and sold it. Then I’d come back with a hammer I’d purchased with that money and steal everything that was nailed down. I wasn’t very good about keeping onto hammers, though.

The right sideleg of the desk had but a single large cabinet. I pulled it out and let out a gasp filled with childlike glee. “Weihnachten has come early this year,” I said, pulling out the cabinet’s Voixson and putting it on the desk.

This Voixson had a luggage tag on its handle which read “Dzawra zô Makôrvidh”.

When I read it, the eager beaver inside me suddenly got the feeling of breaking his buckteeth. If the Voixson was labeled in Mijôra, surely the audio that this thing had recorded also was in Mijôra, right? It had been so long since last I’d seen one of these, just before I killed Sleepy Oaks nearly a month ago, and now that I find one, it’s in a language I didn’t speak? Sighing, I hit the big play button anyways, leaning back.

“More and more, I find myself speaking in Sałca,” came the crackling, recorded voice of Snechta, and my ears perked at it. Staring out at the white tree in the middle of the rotunda’s lake, I listened. “The tongue infests my head as it infests the mouths of our children, for why speak the tongue of your people when everypony understands Equestrian?” She grunted. “It is even the tongue that he speaks to me in my darkest dreams. I sing of hearth, I sing of light, I sing of sweetly frosted things,” she said in a rhythmic singsong, “but anight dream I of dark wings. And song of fire, song of blood, brings he to me a champion strong.”

The singsonging voice ended. “Darks wings and darks words. Of course, dreams are places of anythings, of fancy and madness. I would be mad to think myself an auger of the future. But alone in my temple, I heard his voice whisper into my ears; it came from everywhere. He told me that he was an agent of the truest matriarch, of Dominae Nostrae, Our Lady, just as he had whispered into my dreams the first night after the Empire returned to normal time.

“He told me that he and Our Lady had been watching over me. The voice spoke, and I listened in the darkness of my temple. He told me that, right now, as we spoke, a mighty champion from somewhere far beyond was on his way to Côrint, and the champion would find his way to me.” Snechta hesitated. “The voice told me that I had to have this champion retrieve the fabled book, Calêrhos, and use it to restore Cae Cêlyx. He said that only I could use the book to bring the orb of Cae Cêlyx back to life, and nothing would make the Goddess, Our Lady, a better gift.” Snechta sniffled. “He said that if I offered the resurrected Cae Cêlyx to Our Lady, he would reward me; he would know me, and from that union I would be impregnated with a White Savior, who would grow up to bring the Crystal Empire back to the great power it once was…”

Snechta made sounds like she was poorly holding back tears. “The champion’s name is Jericho of Teutschland; he came today, and I have sent him to find for me Calêrhos. It is the answer to all my prayers… prayers which were only answered in nightmares…” She openly allowed herself to weep.

Then, in a low, distant, quiet voice: “My name is Snechta Annarswn, daughter of Nilla, and if I’ve gone mad, then to whomever is hearing this, this is how i-it all started…”

With a low whir and a click, the Voixson died out.

I sat back in the chair, processing what I’d just heard. The Snechta of that recording sounded terrified and fearful of what she was doing, yet when I’d given her the book only minutes ago, she’d seemed more eager than a psychopath in a hardware store. They seemed incongruent. Something was rotten in the realm of Princess Cadance. It was unpleasant to think that so many ponies here in this city, though, seemed so swayed by the words of a mare who heard voices. Although one thing was nice: there was something about Voixsons that seemed to compel ponies to reveal incriminating personal secrets, and then to just leave them where morally questionable thugs like myself could find them.

Still, something about this rubbed me wrong. It was like that inexplicable feeling of dread you got when you had to go to the restroom, and you just knew that there would be a line. ’Twas with that feeling that I hoofed the little flipped tag over, looking at its back.

“His number is 2133,” it read in a hastily scribbled scrawl. “His name is Corvaet.” The name had been underlined three times. Looking at the name, a wet stream of oh shit slowly slid down my spine. AE was a Mijôra diphthong, that much I could recall from the questions I’d asked. It was pronounced like AI/EI in Teutsche, and like the long I of Equestrians. In normal Equestrian, the name would like be written as Corvite.

In other words, pronounced exactly like Korweit.

And Korweit was the Stimme in der Finsternis, the Voice in the Dark. Korweit, born from the tainted womb of the insectoid demoness known as the White Queen over a thousands years ago. Korweit, or Κῶρβαἴτ as it had been written by the captured Spiegelgestalt, the mirage-pony back in Caval. Korweit, whom Snechta was now taking suggestions and orders from.

“Oh, may God drop a flaming piano on me that explodes in French clowns who only speak the language of inappropriate ass-slapping at a foal’s birthday party,” I groaned, and sprang from the chair, over the desk, and onto my face upon the other side. “I’m good,” I insisted to nopony, standing up and moving to bolt out the door. But in that moment, the door slammed into me as Snechta burst into the room.

“The bitch usurper!” Snechta panted, rushing past me into what I presumed to be her bedroom. “Oh, where is it? Where is it?” she said in panicked voice.

I touched the hilt of my sword, just in case, as I crept into her bedroom. Inside Snechta was running around, tearing the place apart; boxes and junk were flying through the air as she removed them from under the bed, in her closet, or from drawers of dressers.

“Snechta,” I said, a calm determination in my voice.

“What?” she snapped, jolting straight up and looking at me. There was a blue sock hanging from her ear, tears in her eyes. “Can’t you see I’m busy? This is important; I need to find Cae Cêlyx now!”

My muscles tensed. I could see that this would be more difficult than the time I faced the dreaded weresloth. You’d think killing them would be easy, but you also wouldn’t expect to find “sloth” and “disemboweled the guy” in the same sentence. So long as I never forgot, I would be safe from them, though. After all, the first sign that one is becoming a weresloth is forgetting what a weresloth was.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s that bloody bitch of a usurper, Cadance, and her slavering mongrel of a husband, Shining Armor!” Snechta stamped a hoof. “She’s been looking for an excuse to destroy me and those true to the Goddess, and when I acquired the book, Calêrhos, which she knows I must have stolen, she finally had her reasons. They’re out there, in the foyer, Shining Armor and his thugs, mostly crystalfolk who have betrayed Chêngrêla.”

Snechta went back to rooting savagely through her things. Then she stopped, looked up at me, and said, “You, Jericho Amadeus Faust of Teutschland, Champion of Côrint. You, Jericho, who has a body scarred and toned from brutal experience, a face that looks like it were chiseled from hardest stone by a savage god, with a will beyond that of iron and a sword mighty. Go out there and take what they stole from me, the book, Calêrhos. The bastard Prince stole it, and now I need to find the orb, need to find Cae Cêlyx. If Cadance gets both—that’s it. We lose. The Crystal Empire with be forever a shadow under the oppressive hooves of Canterlot.”

“What, exactly, does Cae Cêlyx do?” I asked simply.

“It doesn’t matter!” she shouted through tear-strewn eyes. “Just-just help me, please!”

I gave her a long, hard look. Outside, I could hear shouts and screams. With a long, slow sigh, I pushed aside the tail of my duster and pulled out my sword, awkwardly holding it in my hoof so that I could speak. But before I could speak, Snechta’s gasped, eyes going ludicrously wide for the second time this night.

“That sword…” she muttered.

“What about it?” I inquired innocently.

“I recognize it from the stories. I recognize it from the stained glass in one of the further rooms of the temple, the ones telling the story of a legendary hero and leader who stood up against Discord in his final years and Celestia in her first years, then took his great flock across the Eastern Sea over a thousands years ago. That sword… is Caledfwlch.”

“Well, we in the Reich say it as Kaledfulch, but yes, likely the same thing.”

“B-b-but how did you…?”

I shrugged. “Eh, like I told Cards—or was it Lightning Dust?—the morning before the Songnam Slaughter: I stole it from a museum in Zentrum because the museum was dressed like a slut and had it coming. But with my sword, I’ll capture back the book, because Cadance works for Celestia, and I’m a Teutscher; as the whole saying we have about ourselves goes, we are those that challenge the sun.” I turned to leave. “Oh, and one last thing.”

Snechta looked as if she’d been hit by a cow. “What?”

“Corvaet is a liar.”

“Everypony, calm down!” the big white unicorn in the purple platemail was shouting as he and the numerous guards swarmed up the stairs and into the rotunda. “Everypony please just remain where you are, don’t panic, and we can all go home unharmed tonight.” His light blue eyes scanned the rotunda as ponies remained anywhere but where they were and panicked. Clearly, this stallion was a master of reverse psychology. I bet that all he had to do to sleep with a mare was order her not to rape him.

As I crept down the stairs, I contemplated putting my sword away. So, from afar, it must’ve looked like was trying to dance terribly before finally deciding to sheathe the blade. I was going to try to talk first, because that had always worked in the past. Just like Sleepy Oaks when everypony went crazy, or Songnam up by the castle, or when I met up against the Devil’s Backbone… Okay, bad examples, but the point stood.

From where I was, I could see the stallion in purple armor wearing a purse… no, not a purse. That had a feminine meaning, for some reason. He had a sort of messenger bag slung around his side, the kind Snechta had been wearing, and where I bet Calêrhos was. Ponies were running and screaming around me as I walked with calm indifference towards the mass of guards trying to control what was quickly turning into a riot.

“For the love of Celestia, would you all just calm down!” the stallion shouted.

“I don’t think swearing to Celestia is wise around these ponies,” I offered, walking towards him. I could see at least one pony hiding behind the nearest buffet table ,which was near enough to the guards here. “They seem to have a vague disdain for her. Or, at least, would prefer to swear by a Goddess, not Celestia.”

He jerked his head to me, as did many of his troopers. The bloke wasn’t holding a weapon, even though he easily could have, since he was a unicorn, and the sword at his side looked paltry. “Hello, you there,” he said. “You seem like you have your wits about you. Could you help us calm this whole fiasco down before anypony gets hurts?”

“You mean, before we have to hurt anypony else,” one of his stallions offered, and the purple-armored guy shot him an almost murderous look.

“I’ll be honest with you,” I said, taking the conversation by the horns and readying to be gored, “I worked very hard to steal that book from the Royal Canterlot Archives. I mean, for God’s sake, some crazy mare tried to rape me after she caught me. And no! I don’t care how old it gets, I’m never letting anyone forget this very important fact!”

“Wait, so it was stolen!” the lead stallion shouted. “Cadance was right, and now we have proof!”

“Don’t you need a warrant or something before you can break into a place?” I asked, and the stallion just looked confused.

“What’s a warrant?”

My one good eye twitched. “God, Equestrians have no concept of justice.” I took a deep, long breath. “So, listen here, pony boys, and listen good. You are all going to leave now very quietly and courteously. You will apologize to anypony you might have hurt on the way in here. You will leave with me anything you might have confiscated from this temple. And then you will go back to that floozy, Princess Cadance—”

“Hey!” the stallion in purple barked. “Don’t you dare badmouth my wife!”

“Ah, so that must mean you’re Prince Shining Armor. Fancy that. Glad to see Princess Cadance has terrible taste in stallions. Look at you. You probably taste like lemons. And Cadance must be a special kind of daft to just eat a lemon raw, which she most certainly does because the weird system of Equestrian sexual mores probably means that she either fulfills any wifely duties you place upon her, or you are legally allowed to behead her or something. I don’t know. I’m not from here.”

Shining Armor was gritting his teeth. Some of the stallions by him took steps away.

“But what I do know is that you will leave here in peace, take nothing, and then you will wait the required period to receive a court-approved search warrant allowing you to loot and trash this place however you may like! And then I won’t have anything to say against you. I might fornicate the rules six ways till Sunday, but I at least have the decency to ask it to dinner first. Because you treat the rules like a concubine.”

The stallion seemed almost to be boiling. Then he put a hoof to his chest, followed by letting out a deep breath. Now he almost appeared level-headed, much to my chagrin. “Look,” he said, “none of that nonsense you said will happen.”

I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “You know, I find it funny that even though the Reich, if you really dig deep down into it relating to the power of the King, is technically a hereditary military autocracy that honestly believes it’s a constitutional democracy, it still is less authoritarian and arbitrary than Equestria. It’s a marvel.”

He said nothing.

“Give me back the book that I stole fair and square from Canterlot, and we can consider ourselves even,” I offered.

“And I’m afraid you’ll have to lay down on the ground with your hooves on your head; you’re under arrest for theft.”

We faced each other, staring at each other. One of us dressed in purple platemail that covered so little of his actual flesh that he sort of looked like a male stripper. The other dressed like a bladeslinger.

“It seems we’re at an impasse,” I said. “Mayhap we could compromise? You put the bag with the book down, and I’ll put my sword down. We go at this mano-a-mano. And by that, I mean I kick your ass because Equestrians don’t know how to fight.”

“No.”

I sighed, shaking my head. “Fine. Have it your way.” I had my sword in my mouth so fast that if anyone had been looking directly at the action, they’d surely have spots in their eyes from the flash of movement. At Shining Armor I went.

“I’ve had enough of you,” he said in a voice that sounded like he was ready to strangle a kitten, telekinecting out his sword. It had a purple hilt. So cute!

I ran at him, leaning myself to the left, readying for a strike. When Shining Armor brought his sword to his right to defend, I tossed my sword at his sword, throwing my body to the right.

As luck would have it, his first instinct was to try to deflect the sharp rod of steel flying at him.

His first response was not, however, to go for the bladeslinger ducking around his side. I used what I’d learned from the Cherrypillar as I struck his exposed leg. In the same fluid motion, so fast that Armor couldn’t even snap his head to see it, I grabbed the messenger bag, lifting it partially, then pulled back as hard as I could.

The fun part about this was that he fell to the ground. Even better, as I pulled on the bag, the thick straps found their way to his neck. In less obtrusive words, I was strangling him.

Game. Set. Match.

“So, now I know how your wife must feel each night,” I said to him through gritted teeth, pulling back on the bag even harder, even putting a hoof on the back of his neck to keep his face in the ground. “That must really suck about being a mare: odds are, your partner probably can’t last, and so every night you go to bed unsatisfied. Glad I never had this problem. That is, speaking of the time where I was a briefly a mare.”

Armor’s horn flashed, and a curious purple welt appeared on the back of his neck. Only, it was glowing and rather transparent, as if it were exceptionally clear tinted glass. It grew and expanded outwards like an umbrella, but worse. When it pushed at the straps strangling him, I believed I knew what he was doing. And when the little umbrella of purple got so massive that it snapped the straps, sending the pack flying over towards the buffet table, I jumped off him.

The stallion slowly rose to his hooves, panting and gasping, his eyes red and watery. Around him, the magical welt pulsed, then shifted over to his front, still in the shape of an umbrella, but still worse.

“Magic shields,” I spat. “You know, where I’m from, I was tasked with hunting out witches and warlocks such as you and bringing your kind to justice, to death, as was commanded by God and the Mare Laurentia.” I frowned, pouting. “Mostly because magic is cheating, you cheater! Cheater, cheater, not even good enough to eat out your wife-er!”

He flashed me wicked grin. “It’s not cheating if it’s a fair dice roll.”

That took me a second to process. “Natural D-twenties?”

“Of course.”

I whistled, except that I didn’t know how to whistle ,and so just sort of awkwardly spat at him. “Hey, but kudos to your gear.” I walked off to the side, picked up my sword, sheathed it, and went back to where’d I’d been. “You’re the smart kind of mage: the one who dresses like anything but a mage.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “This guys gets it. If you dress like a mage, they’re going to target you first, because mages are easy to kill.”

“Exactly!”

“So, what, you play Oubliettes and Ogres?”

“Never heard of that, but when I was a kid, I played Dunkelheit und Drachen.” I stamped a hoof. “Bitch, I’m a level twenty Bard! My charisma is so high that I could punch you straight in the face and convince you successfully that it was the wind.”

Shining Armor threw back his head and laughed. He laughed some more. “Oh, Celestia—you know I’m still gonna beat your teeth out of your skull and arrest you, right?”

“Wimpy wizard, I’d like to see you try!”

One of the guards shouted out, “No, don’t touch that!”

Armor and I whipped our heads around. The stallion who’d been hiding behind the buffet table had hopped over it and was grabbing the book that’d fallen out of the little messenger bag. He had red eyes, a somewhat curly black mane that extended to the base of his head, and looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. Something inside my head clicked, and I recognized him as Stronghold, the errant son of Dean/Mayor Kitten Whispers. All at once, I had two thoughts.

Hey, look! It’s the B plot. I was wondering when that would show up again.

And the other thought was that I recognized Stronghold from somewhere else. In fact, those red eyes of his that reminded me so much of Cards practically were Cards’ eyes. Stronghold “Strong” was the stallion I’d known as Sheriff Strong of Sleepy Oaks—the father of Cards. Which meant that Kitten Whisper’s was Cards’ grandfather. And that one officer had told me that the Tin Mare was the new girl who was a relative of Kitten Whisper’s and who seemed to be emotionally scarred, which more-than-likely meant that the Tin Mare of Hoofington was Cards herself!

Strong flipped open the door, his eyes mad. And not like the normal mad of my ex-girlfriend, This was more like the mad of my ex when she was horny. Very unpleasant memories. “Where’s it? Where’s it?!” he kept demanding of it.

“Sheriff Strong!” I shouted, and he didn’t even flinch. “Strong, what are you doing?” I demanded. Nothing. “Armor, please excuse me, this is really important!” I charged at the haggard, tired-looking stallion.

“Here!” he cried out in ecstasy, and his horn lit up as if casting a spell. “Włamaq. Caetrosch.”

“No, magic is cheating!” I yelled out, jumping to tackle him. I had contact and grabbed, but not before he let out a third word.

“Pflyç!”

A crack of thunder deafened me, my eye blinded by a green light. I held on as tight as I could to Strong, my face burying in his belly. Somehow still, he disappeared, as if he just evaporated. Judging by how cold I suddenly felt, I could safely conclude that I wasn’t in Snechta’s temple anymore.

The floor was cold and felt like it was made of glass. There was no light in the room. My muscles kept asking me “What the hell, mate?” in their own special way: hurting me until I cried for Momma, mentally pictured her naked, and then agreed to find the actual naked pictures of her in order to sell to the magazines. My muscles were dicks like that. And mildly incestuous, apparently.

A voice in my head, that of my father, raged at me in my head. Get up, damn you! Get up, or the floor will sap all heat from your sorry excuse of a body.

I grunted. “Just five more minutes. I’m at the part of the dreams where the girl blows… Oh, God, no! Standing up!” I bolted to my hooves, the distance from the ground to my head so wide that I was momentarily hit with vertigo.

And keep your hooves off my wife, Father spat. Easily, my mind’s eye could picture him shaking his head at me, him and his proud handlebar mustache. The last time you were inside of her, you ended up killing her.

Shaking with horror and some cold, I tried to get a grip on my bearings. Although that was a little hard to concentrate on when your crotch felt as if it suddenly had too much room because your balls had suddenly decided to try nesting inside your body.

Regardless of testicular trauma, I found myself in a dark room. That was my first deduction, which I was unreasonably proud for concluding. It dawned on me that I’d probably gotten here via teleportation, and that thought sent me scrambling to touch every part of me to make sure that I was all where I was supposed to be. This ended with me grabbing my groin and trying to force my balls down, because I had to make sure that they hadn’t been swapped for, like, my kidneys or something. That was time well-spent.

As my vision better adjusted to the darkness, I could see a doorway in the wall of this place. Next to it was a little sign. “Sombra’s Door of Worst Nightmares. Do not open. THIS MEANS YOU.”

“You have tempted fate,” I told the sign, and opened the door. I saw what was inside the door, and the object in focus within was very bright. Apparently, it wasn’t a door at all. It was just a mirror. I stuck my tongue out at myself, then closed the door. “Well, that was a thoroughly unsatisfying worst nightmare,” I commented.

Pulling away from the mirror, I found that my eyes had adjusted even better. I could makes out bunches of dusty old crates forming a sort of hallway. Since there was nothing better to do than take a walk down Creepy Lane, I did.

As I walked, I saw that many of what I’d thought here boxes weren’t boxes, but more like little shrines and tables alongside boxes. One such table had a dead raven with three eyes splayed out, its underside cut open, its organs mummified. At one point, there was a severed eye in a jar that followed me around. But I stopped to stare back at it, it looked off. Its little jostles, I figured as I walked off, were focused purely around movement.

Then I came across another door. This one had a faint white light bubbling out from beneath its heavyset frame. “Either Strong is in there with that book which I need in order to heal myself,” I said, “or a giant tentacled elder thing is in there, knitting me a gaily decorated sweater. Made from the vaginal flesh of slain little fillies.”

I swung the door in and rolled in. It was the first option, thanks be to God.

Strong was standing before what looked like a really oblong, narrow doorway that stood upon a pedestal. He was reading from Calêrhos, and, bitch, that was my book! When he saw me, he swore. “Go away!” he shrieked.

“Stronghold, son of Kitten Whispers, father of Cards, I order you to halt!”

“No!” he shouted, and I could see desperate tears in his eyes, like an elephant with its foot stuck in a beehive. Elephants were terribly phobic of beeees. “I don’t have a choice, don’t you see! The legends of Calêrhos are true! I learned of them, have been learning of them, and now I finally have it! I can bring her back!”

“You’re a crazy idiot and your face is probably going to explode if you use that book; you’re no mage.”

“Leave me be! You don’t know what it’s like without her!”

I walked towards him, slowly, ever so slowly. “Who, Cards? Cards is alive and well, trust me. Well, maybe not well; I might have seriously screwed her up mentally, but you can still hug her, buy her a stuffed animals, take naked pictures of her in the shower. You know, normal fatherly things!”

“Not Cards!” he snapped. “I know she’s well; I mean the light of my loins, the one mare I ever truly loved, the monster who will forever posses my heart, without whom I cannot bear to live.”

“Blackout?” I asked, cocking my head. “Your old bitch of a wife?”

“Don’t you speak ill of her, wretched butcher!” he spat, making a hoof gestured before uttering more words. The doorway seemed to shimmer and undulate in its frame. “She’s dead, and I know because I saw the body! I cradled her corpse, wept and begged that she come back to me, and I watched you kill the ponies I’d cared for and protected for over eighteen years!”

I flinched. “But necromancy isn’t the right option! I’m pretty sure that bringing somepony back good as new and untainted requires some serious equine sacrifice, friend.”

“Necromancy?” He howled with laughter, and pointed at the shimming mirror within the doorframe. “They say that through Calêrhos is another world, a realm where all we ponies live, where they are and are not us! It’s like Fiddler’s Green. But Cadance and Celestia sealed the doorway forever and planned to burn this book. But with it, I can force the door open, I can go into the doorway, and I can bring Blackout back!”

“Okay, plot dumps aside, you’re a crazy pony.” I pointed to my chest. “Coming from me, that’s kind of a big deal. So, just come here, give me a hug, and I’ll help you buy Cards a big ol’ present. She’ll be so happy, and—”

The doorway’s mirror made a deep noise like someone punching a bowl of toilet water. A wooden door appeared before the doorway, and Stronghold smiled at me like a dog with its nose covered in paprika. “Magic is as magic does, you son of a bitch. And this book is mine.”

Stronghold, laughing like a banshee getting a really good blowjob, sprinted for the doorway. It flung open on its own, the mirror beyond it quivering like the surface of a lake wherein a racist zebra is being drowned by a sad clown. He leapt through the doorway, and the wooden frame of the door slammed behind Strong.

God! I thought, trying to chase after him. This was not how today was supposed to go.

The doorknob wouldn’t turn. I pounded and slammed on the door. “Open!” I commanded. “I want my freaking eye and horn back, so open! Open! Open!” Nothing. So I pounded harder. “Open, open, open, open!” Not a thing. Then a desperate thought came to mind, and I gave it a try. “Please open?” Something in the door clicked.

Oh, you snooty, prick-faced bastard of a door.

I grabbed the doorknob—a device which was rare in Teutschland—and swung the door open. The mirror in the door was gone. Instead, there was an image. And I looked at the image.

And I screamed with true terror for the first time in my adult life, slamming the door shut and falling down on shaky legs.

Breathe, damn you, breathe! Father ordered in my ear. Do you want to see with both eyes once again? Do you want to telekinetically pick things up once more, to be able to swordfight while providing witty banter once more?

“Y-yes,” I whispered, and the voices in my head didn’t have to say any more. I stood up, faced the door, and opened it.

Without further thought, with the simple resolve that had made me the last of my line, the resolve to continue marching on to be hero even after I’d killed all my friends through mistake or by my own hoof, with the single-minded and unflinching resolve that I could still make a difference and help people even if I was a child-killing monster, and which had allowed me to cross the world and face its horrors without ever losing the smile on my face, I stepped through the doorway and into the mirror.