The storm was flashing below, lightning stuttering his paramagnetic flight field and the thunder shivering through Falcon Punch's bones, but the ex-Guardspony felt the interference of another's flight field coming at his own fast, from high on his six.
He did not stop to question who or why, the stimulus simply touched old responses conditioned in to him by the Guard's obsessive drill. He automatically rolled to his left, because most attackers would strike to the right, and the first crossbow bolt sung through the air where his back had been, passing so close to him that he could distinctly feel it passing through the field emitted by his wings as they pushed him hard to the left.
I'm under attack! he realized in utter horrified surprise, but though his conscious mind was almost paralyzed by emotional shock, his training continued to condition his responses, and he jinked right in midair, pulling his head up and tail down so he was standing vertical, turning to see his attacker. He saw Professor Soar streak by, crossbow in hand, the other Pegasus turning toward him and braking, bringing his crossbow up almost in line with Falcon's own torso.
The enemy must be behind me! he thought and he inverted his wings, pitching backward into an inverted dive, but as he snap-turned he could see nothing behind him and he wondered what Soar was aiming at, only to hear the snap of Soar's crossbow firing quite close to him, and watch in utter shock as the bolt passed between his hind legs, whickering through the long hairs of his tail and almost cutting skin. Severed hairs fell behind him in the dive, and he yelled "Watch out! You're shooting wild!" as he frantically scanned the sky, trying to locate the real attacker.
He looped and climbed back up, unable to see any foe no matter where he looked -- all he could see was Professor Soar, frantically working the bolt of his bigger crossbow, loading and winding what must have been the last bolt from his magazine, while Falcon himself darted his own crossbow around uselessly, trying and failing to find any target for his smaller quick-shooter.
And then he came up, at an angle that would let himself and Soar scan the whole sky between him, with only a small blind spot represented by each other's bodies and wings, and he started to say "Back to back!" -- the position in which they would have maximum visibility and safety against the unseen foe, and all he said was "Back --" before he realized that Soar's eyes were fixed on himself, Soar's crossbow coming up to aim center-of-mass on Falcon's own body.
And as that realization shocked his brain to realization of what was really going on -- though he still didn't know why -- in that last second of possible future in this lifetime -- he began to bring his own bow up -- to shoot the Professor who had unaccounatably changed from sky-friend to deadly foe -- in that last second Falcon's age betrayed him, for at forty-nine he was simply not as fast as he had been three decades ago when he and his wing-mate had beaten twice as many Griffons on their own over the seas off Baltimare.
He was still fast, yes but Soar was just that crucial bit faster. Just as he stroked the trigger and the action of his crossbow began to work, something punched him hard over the top of his barrel, knocking him back in the sky. He saw his bolt slash through Soar's left foreleg, and Soar's own bow went wild with the recoil and tore from the other Pegasus' right hoof, going sailing off into the cloudscape, but it didn't matter now, nothing would matter any more for Falcon Punch. The aging ex-Guardspony looked down to see the familiar bulk of the package, but above it what at first looked like a metal attachment sticking out from his harness.
Why, I never noticed that rod before, Falcon Punch started to think, and then he breathed out and the bright red fluid sprayed forth to mist the air before him, and he knew he had his death-wound. Oh, damn, he thought. I wasn't ... enough ... and then he tried to breathe in for his next wingstroke and he began convulsively choking, starting to drown in midair on his own blood, and he lost his upward momentum, hung for a moment, wings shuddering still for the last time ...
... and Professor Soar reached forward with his right hoof, left foreleg hanging uselessly at his side, braced himself against with his hind hooves and tried to yank loose the package. It was hopelessly stuck, and the Professor glared at him with a strange combination of anger and ... sorrow?
Then Falcon must have started to hallucinate, for there was a flash of green fire, and where the Professor had been was an impossibility, something the size and general shape of a small Alicorn, but it was black and green and in its chitinous form bore a hideous resemblance to a gigantic insect, despite the fact that it had only four hole-pitted legs and two membranous wings, quite unlike any bug he had ever seen. It had a pale greenish yellow mane, and greenish yellow slitted eyes, and about it was something that said to him female, though it looked like no mare he had ever seen in or out of nightmares.
The creature's horn flared, and the straps on his harness parted. The package came free in the mare-thing's right hoof, and for a moment it held him by its hind-hooves, while he flailed around weakly, no longer having the strength to even try to breathe, and everything began to become dim around him. Anoxia ... he thought dully, another useless word from the life that was now ending.
The mare-thing spoke.
"Sorry," she said in a strange buzzing voice. "Nothing personal. Orders ..."
And then she let go.
In his dimming sight she was the last thing he saw, falling away far above ... no, he must have been falling away far below.
He could feel the air rushing around him, whipping his limp wings and shaking his strengthless limbs as he began the long last plummet. He had time for one last thought, a last despairing silent mind-cry wrung out of the depths of his soul as he realized the worst part of this.
Strawberry ... he thought, his last mental image his wife's own dear face.
Falcon Punch could no longer feel the air. He could no longer feel the need to breathe. He could no longer feel anything. He no longer was ...
***
And in a house just northwest of Ponyville, Strawberry Lyn Berry, who had been in the middle of serving an early supper, coughed convulsively and fainted, right before her disbelieving daughters, the bowl of warm honeyed oatmeal she had been holding spattering across the kitchen floor.
"Mommy's fallen," commented three-year-old Raspberry Lyn calmly, then, seeing no sign of motion, turned to her elder sister and cried "Mommy's fallen! Help!" Tears sprung from her frightened purplish eyes.
Blackcherry "Cheerilee" Lee, aged nine, stood frozen in utter shock for a moment, nothing in her nine years of life having prepared her for such an event as her mother simply falling down on the kitchen floor. Mercifully, she was not yet knowledgeable enough to even grasp the possibilities of heart attack or stroke that would have occurred to an older filly. All she knew was that there was trouble, Mommy was in no condition to do anything to help them because she had fallen asleep in the middle of supper, and her baby sister was scared and needed her.
This was a key moment in Cheerilee's life, a moment when her sense of purpose crystalized. It was not the moment when she got her cutie mark -- that would happen years later, when her destiny had set more firmly, but it was the moment when something that had been as yet merely potential in her became actual, when she learned what her general role would be in any crisis.
Daddy wasn't here. Mommy was sleeping. And her baby sister was crying.
Somepony had to take charge, and she was the only pony awake, present, and not hopelessly terrified.
So she took charge.
"Mommy just fell down," Cheerilee explained, in a childish treble version of the voice which would by two decades later be familiar to every schoolchild in town. "You need to be good and calm while I get her up again, okay?"
Raspberry nodded silently, her right hoof stuck firmly in her own mouth, her lips sucking. tears rolling down her cheeks, but her sobs stilled.
Cheerilee stepped over to her mother, bent down, looked into her face. "Mommy?" she asked. "I think you should get up. Raspberry's scared. She needs you to tell her it's all right."
There was no response.
She'd heard somewhere what to do about this. She'd never done it, but she'd heard somepony say they had, and that was as good as any guide in such a strange situation.
Cheerilee trotted over to the sink, climbed up to the top of the countertop to get a good grip on the handle, and worked the pump, filling a cup of water. Then she hopped down, took the cup and dashed the contents, directly into her mother's face.
Strawberry sat up spluttering. "Wha --" she said, then saw Cheerilee standing there, cup still in her hoof. "Why --?"
"Mommy, you fell down and wouldn't answer, so I woke you with the water." her eldest daughter explained.
"Yeah," chimed in Raspberry, pulling her hoof out of her mouth, "An' you look funny all wet!"
"What happened, mommy?" Cheerilee asked. "What was wrong?"
"I ..." Strawberry kneaded her forehead, with both hooves, "I don't really know, dear." She blinked repeatedly. "I was in a storm, and then I was choking, and then I was falling. And that was it." Tears started from her eyes, began rolling down her cheeks. "It was all over. All over ..."
"Why are you crying?" asked Cheerilee.
"I don't know ..." she said, and the silent tears continued. "I don't know!"
Raspberry looked in horror and tears began to well up in her eyes as well.
"I think you should get up, Mommy," said Cheerilee, pushing herself under her mother's rump and nudging hard.
Strawberry, responding automatically to a stimulus that had been known to her ancestors twenty thousand years ago, when the difference between succeeding and failing to get up when predators menaced the herd could also mean the difference between survival and death, got up. Normally, it would have been the mare performing this service for her child rather than the other way round, but instincts in sapient mammals are surprisingly flexible.
There was a flash of light visible through the windows. They waited for many seconds, then came a low distant rumble.
There was a thunderstorm over the Everfree.
"I hope Daddy's not out in that," commented Cheerilee. Both fillies were Earth Ponies like their mother, but they knew that their father didn't like to fly through storms.
And once again, Strawberry began crying, quite without knowing the reason why.
***
Ceymi held the mummy of the unknown and obviously unfortunate nymph and clutched it to her chest with her one remaining good forelimb, cursing the ill-luck that had let Falcon sense and dodge two of her attacks, and react fast enough to realize what she was doing and get off that one accurate bolt before her own last bolt found his heart, or close enough that the fast-acting drug on the bolt must have been stopping his heart and lungs even as she spoke those last outrageously-weak and sentimental words to her prey. The wound had healed, of course, when she Shifted. But even transformation magic, even the wondrously-flexible transformation magic of what the Queen called the Master Race, is not without cost.
Her left foreleg was still terribly weak -- she would need to eat a meal of protein, drink fluids and consume love in order to restore both flesh and energy. She didn't dare try to hold the mummy in it, or she might drop it -- if it landed near Falcon's corpse that would rather totally obviate the entire point of the mission. She'd lost her crossbow, so her spare bolts were about as useful as an ovipositor on a drone. She had a knife -- which she couldn't wield very effectively with her magic almost exhausted and one foreleg out of commission. Otherwise, she could risk over-channeling herself in the midst of the worst wilderness on the whole damned continent, a place so hostile that it made the Badlands seem almost friendly by comparison.
At least in the Badlands the monsters weren't packed nearly so dense.
For a moment she hung there indecisively, then duty won over safety and sanity. Ceymi had been ordered to confirm the kill, and so she would. Tipping forward, she buzzed her wings and power-dove after Falcon Punch, her black chitinous body cleaving the clouds, her flightfield automatically polarizing to let her through rather than support her upon the thickening masses of cloud.
Vapor whipped past her form as she dove, and visibility dropped to ridiculously short distances within the cloud-masses. From a distance there had seemed to be a decent ceiling between the base of the thunderstacks and the forest far below, but of course she had only viewed these particular clouds from above.
This was a crazy risk to run -- if the ceiling had dropped to the tops of the trees, she would not have nearly enough time to pull out of her dive. Even with her flightfield snapping to maximum, she would face broken bones, and lie there crippled in the midst of the Everfree, facing a choice of capture by Equestrian search party or death by brute beasts.
Still -- she was pretty sure she hadn't yet gone down a mile. Ceymi knew how fast she could fly in a power dive, and she knew how far it was to the ground -- both very roughly -- so she could even more roughly estimate her altitude. She briefly wished that there were some way of seeing through the clouds of directly sensing her altitude save with an inner ear already confused by the pressure drop within the storm. I might as well wish to fly to the Moon on a magic ship, she told herself scornfully.
At one point in the clouds there was a flash and every single one of her muscles extended simultaneously. She tumbled out of control, slowing back toward terminal velocity as she lost active propulsion, but never actually lost consciousness, and a few moments later, Ceymi snapped back into an active flight posture, wings again vibrating, emitting paramagnetism. Only a tiny fraction of the static electricty had discharged directly into her -- if any large amount had, she would have become a charred and twisted curiosity, perhaps for Equestrian scientists to puzzle over if she were sufficiently unlucky.
How far had she fallen now? She needed to slow down ... she must be well below a thousand feet now ... Ceymi reduced thrust, then began to curve her course up from the vertical, emitting paramagnetism downward, reducing the velocity of her descent. She had to do this carefully -- trying to pull out too fast could damage her wings. They weren't as robust as those of an actual pegasus, and weak as her magic was right now, she did not want to try Shifting back to a pegasus form in mid-descent.
Ceymi came out of the clouds around five hundred feet off the ground and still in a fairly steep dive. She saw mixed woodland beneath her, the canopy happily low, giving her well over four hundred feet of clearance between the clouds and the trees. She frantically pulled up, flaring paramagnetism downward, trying to build up an active cushion beneath her. The buildup of her field attracted lightning which fortunately discharged directly into the field instead of into her body, but less fortunately collapsed the field beneath her.
Once again she tumbled, this time for a much shorter time, but in a situation where she was rapidly running out of sky beneath her, her ears ringing from the thunderbolt. Third time will be the charm, she thought gloomily, and was rewarded by a second strike following the ion path of the first one. Fortunately, she had already managed to get out of the path on aerodynamics alone, and she looked down to see the forest clawing up to meet her.
She had no choice if she did not want to smear herself into a crater somewhere within a few miles of Falcon Punch's own self-dug tomb: with her flight-field down she would suffer serious injury in any crash. She buzzed her wings, re-igniting her flight field, and through some combination of extreme good luck, managed to burn off much of her vertical velocity and pull up into perfect horizontal flight. The next few moments were exciting ones, as she jinked right and left to avoid smacking directly into tree boles, all the while air-braking to come to an absolutely perfect landing, remembering at the last moment to pull up her injured left foreleg so that she did not land on it with the momentum of her landing added to her normal weight and injure herself further.
Ceymi stood three-legged for a moment, gingerly putting down her left foreleg and discovering that she could, in fact, put a little weight on it, though it still felt tender. Rain lashed her, lightning flashed again and again, and were it not for her excellent low-light vision she couldn't really have seen much. The adrenaline from the last few minutes drained out of her system, and she shuddered, suddenly realizing that she was wet, exjaisted. hurt, and had nearly gotten killed several times over.
This was a bad plan, she realized Even granted that I had to let the courier have the package, instead of giving him a fake or just taking the mummy back to the Hive after we secured Thermal Soar, I could have killed Falcon Punch back in the Palomino, then carried the corpse over the Everfree and dropped him there. Instead, I had to ambush him over the Everfree, then dive after him to make sure he was dead.
I'm pretty sure I killed him, she continued the thought. My bolt took him somewhere in the upper barrel, went somewhere respiratory from all the blood, and there was enough tranquilizer on the tip to put him to sleep somewhere in midair, meaning that he made the hard landing I just barely avoided. Assuming, that is, that he didn't just drown in his own blood on the way down. I find it incredibly unlikely that he's alive after all that, or that he'd last much longer if by some miracle he did somehow live through getting shot, then falling over a mile.
I would never have done this if it had not been at the Queen's direct orders, and if she had not merely specified letting Falcon have the mummy and then killing him with Thermal's crossbow over the Everfree, but also insisted that I confirm the kill by checking the crash site. This was stupid. Granted, the Queen couldn't have possibly known she would be ordering me to fly into a thunderstorm but that is exactly why one normally gives Infitrators some discretion in the details of fulfilling their missions Why is she being so absurdly specific about this all?
She looked around herself. She did not, of course, expect to land right beside Falcon's corpse. That would have required absurd good fortune, given the combined effects of changing winds, the fact that she had leveled off and landed rather than plummeted to her own death. But she did think it likely that he was somewhere within five, maybe ten miles.
Such a search would have been hopeless, given the conditions, were it not for one thing that Ceymi happened to know. Namely, the paramagnetic resonance frequency patterns of standard Guards ID tags, which all Guards wore around their necks for just such location purposes -- such as being trapped in the middle of a trackless forest awaiting rescue. Its secondary purpose was to locate their dead bodies should they be beyond the point where rescue would do them any good, and that was what Ceymi was now doing.
This was more difficult in a thunderstorm, As is pretty much everything, Ceymi thought with some peevishness, but it was not impossible. She waited for a lull in the storm, resting for the meantime on the against a fallen tree, huddling beneath the trunk (she did not want to chance sitting under a standing tree in such a storm), her back to the bole and an eye out for any predator stupid enough to go hunting in a thunderstorm. Stupid like a Changeling Princess, she realized, since that's pretty much what I am in the middle of doing.
After a moderate amount of time -- no more than half an hour or so, not nearly enough time for the Guards at Canterlot to get worried by their non-arrival -- the frequency of the flashes lessened and the time between flashes and booms lengthened. The worst of the storm was moving on beyond this point,
Somewhat rested -- though far from recuperated -- Ceymi judged that she had more than enough energy to cast one simple little locator spell, fly to the crash site, and fly back to the Hive. For that matter, after she found the site, she could take a Pegasus form -- she had at least one or two such identities in which she had little invested. Tootsie Pop herself hadn't been seen much in the last twenty years, and had no current contacts in Equestria. Pegasi were far better for long-distance flying, and had the advantage that nopony seeing one would report a "buzzy" sighting.
But she needed to have a horn to cast the spell, and she did not desire to slog through the Everfree on foot in the rain without having a quick way to escape any aggressive animals. Or plants, even. Life was more than a bit strange in the deep Everfree.
So after making sure the storm really had mostly passed on, Ceymi hopped back up into the air and cast her spell.
North by north west. The bearing to the locator was an awareness in the back of her mind, something sensed rather than seen. She cruised slowly about a hundred feet above the treetops, which she judged should be enough distance between her and any likely hungry maws. She was a bit tired, but remained alert -- it would be oh-so-stupid to die now, after she'd successfully. completed what should logically have been the truly dangerous parts of her mission, despite the idiotic plan she'd been forced to follow.
Nothing ate her. She found the crash site, and what was left of Falcon Punch.
She set down there, after first peering carefully into the vegetation for creatures wanting to take advantage of the lunch delivery from above. She regarded him a bit sadly. Aerodynamically, he should have hit head-first, but he'd clipped a tree on the way down -- she could see the broken branches -- and struck tail-first instead.
His head, shoulders and forelegs were protruding from the ground, more or less right side up, and he almost looked as if he could have been alive, merely buried in the ground. The rain had even washed the blood from his mouth. But he had her crossbow bolt in his chest, he was not breathing, and his head lolled at an angle that looked as if he'd taken a broken neck from his arboreal impact. She touched his face gently -- he was as cold as the rain. Falcon Punch had flown his last flight.
I wish I hadn't had to kill you, she thought again. You fought pretty well. You almost got me. Glad that it's you lying there instead of me ...but it's too bad that either of us had to die this day. She could not say that she was grief-stricken over the death of an enemy, but it was all so pointless. He had a lot of love for his family. Some of it could have gone to the Hive.
And that was that. She hefted the mummy ...
... and something --- a rustle in the leaves, a sudden stillness, maybe the motion in the air -- warned her at the last moment, and she flung herself to one side as the manticore's paw smacked the wet soil where she had been standing. She dodged again a moment later as it followed up on the attack.
As the beast gathered itself to strike again and again and again, like one of those little cats the Ponies kept playing with a mouse, Ceymi simultaneously sprayed a wide-angle beam from her horn into its face -- not enough to really hurt it,. but enough to make the monster recoil, hissing. In one swift motion that she would have sworn a minute ago she lacked the energy to perform, she scooped up the mummy in her right foreleg, reared, and leaped for the sky, wings buzzing. Something swiped the air as she launched herself, but the scorpion tail was way too slow and inaccurate with the creature half-blinded.
Ceymi gained altitude, listening to the angry roars of the beast diminishing as it fell away beneath her.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me, she thought to herself. Does this little bit of forest hate me personally? It was probably interested in the corpse, but once it saw me it thought live game would be more fun. Rosedust's freaking rear-hole, I so very much hate manticores. They always hate me. They'll be the death of me someday, if something else in this insane forest doesn't get me first!
She buzzed away southward, the mummy whose existence had caused all this suffering firmly in her grasp.
Home, she thought, home and the Hive and some long-earned rest, where nothing's trying to kill me.
After she was about three hundred feet up, she Shifted to Tootise Pop, letting herself fly on her broader and stronger wings. It was still raining, but the lightning storm had passed away to the north, and as she flew the visibility began to improve.
I should be safe now, she thought. The Hive is boring, my fellow Changelings are mostly imbeciles, but if it is one thing the Hive most definitely is, that is safe. Besides, maybe it'll be a bit more interesting now, with old Thermal in a cyst. I can give him a lovedream, take my time about it, get not only some of that incredibly tasty love of his but talk a bit, maybe about geology. or philosophy -- he was always so interesting to talk with, I looked forward to his mind almost as much as I did to his love. Maybe more so.. He can't learn any more now, not in the field, but we can talk -- as long as I don't bring him all the way out of it, it should be easy.
I can be Starry Eyes. He'll remember Tootsie Pop's a Changeling now, but I never blew Starry Eyes as a cover -- he really likes her, she'll be an excellent Mask. She smiled to herself. It'll be almost as good as before. Maybe more so, because I won't be among the prey -- nothing too bad could ever happen to me in the Hive. He'll last a good long time -- I'll make sure that he does. I'll have my own private little love-stash.
The idea warmed her, despite the cold rain. And so Princess Ceymi winged away back homeward, thinking happy thoughts.