Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 39 — Back in Black

Lights.

After so long so deep under the hellish earth, I still really didn’t care. Sunshine, happiness, and also the apparent inability to do fun things. There was probably a witty observation therein, but I as crawled up the ancient wall of rubble, overgrown with stupid green plants possessing annoying thorns even though it was bloody winter, I couldn’t care less.

This place seemed as if it’d been hit with a pretty bad party—we’re talking the kind where all the girls are half your age, all the colts were terribly androgynous, and where “eating glass” was the hip thing that all the kids were doing. It’d once been underground, but the roof had long since collapsed, and now it was just a weird dent in the ground. Little pools of ice were scattered all about the lower area, with just tiny little puddles thereof wedged between some of the rocks, which was still enough to cause me to slip and fall twice. But that was okay because I landed on Ylv, and he clearly wasn’t interesting enough to actually survive for very long in my line of work.

It was a well-known fact that only interesting ponies got to survive if you were an adventurer.

There was a small outcrop of ancient buildings up here, tucked away in a thick nooket of forest. My hooves made crunching noises in the snow as Ylv shivered. I just looked at him before dancing around to show my superiority for not getting cold.

The stone structures all had their roofs collapsed under snow likely hundreds of years ago. Yet, there were still signs of animal life around here, little tracks from tiny, barely edible animals. Also, there were the signs of an animal Ylv called a “wolfspider”. When I asked him why a creature that was clearly as big as a wolf yet clearly had been walking on eight legs shared its name with an adorably harmless spider, he only shrugged.

Eventually, our trek through the woods led us to what had once been a mountain path, with stone stairs only partially covered in snow leading upwards. Wind whipped past, moving my duster in that incredibly badass way, so of course I took point and walked as badass-ly as possible up the stairs, with a dramatic swagger to my step. Ylv asked me why I had suddenly gained a limp.

One way or the other, this trail led to a little passage alongside a steeper section of the mountains. From here, I could see Côrint in all its splendor, from Little Equestria to the rich central districts, to the parts of the city clearly showing the telltale signs of urban decay. From what I’d gathered, the Crystal City was massive by Equestrian standards.

I wasn’t sure where, but I recalled reading something that amongst the biggest cities in Equestria were Manehattan, Canterlot, the Crystal City, and Songnam. The source really hadn’t been very useful, as I couldn’t recall anything about populations or actual size, but… hadn’t someone, perhaps Duke Elkington, said that Songnam was the biggest city in the South?

In any case, I thought as the wind buffed me, rushing through the pine trees and kicking up snow, Canterlot, Songnam, and Côrint all paled in comparison to massive industrial cities of the Reich. Zentrum alone had around ten million denizens, a full tenth of the population of the pre-Crusade Reich. And as I could see whence I stood, Côrint utterly lacked that terribly organized, and most certainly boring street and city layout/design that your standard Teutonic city had.

Satisfied in my random pool of national superiority (go misplaced nationalism!), I trudged through the pass until we ended up in a little canyon. And by little, I mean it was more like a giant axe had struck into to the earth, and then he’d taken his axe and gone home because rocks were boring. Far above I could see a long stone bridge connection on side of gap to a mountainside. I recognized this place, although the sound noises of many, many ponies bustling far above was new.

Ylv panted as we climbed up the side of the gap. “How are you not panting, sedhoas?”

“Well, considering how one of my lungs got stabbed and is now a really shitty lung, I’m going to chalk it up to the fact that you just suck,” I replied casually before taking in a long, calm breath just to agitate Ylv further. Despite being nigh vertical, the many roots of long-entrenched trees made it easy enough to find purchase until the ground leveled out far more. But by then, I could see what all that noise was coming from.

Here, just before the bridge, had been erected a large shantytown. It stretched onwards to the far point where the hill began to tilt downwards, and then even beyond. I recalled vaguely how there were enough flat little—for lack of a better word—terraces just beyond this incline, so I could imagine this little city could have extended for quite a while.

“Ylv, what is this?” I asked.

“Uh, wow. This is bigger than I’d thought,” he replied, brushing dirt and pine needles from his armor as we stood at the very edge of the camp. “I’d heard that a bunch of ponies had gone up and left the city for the temple, but this is much more. This is a whole town altogether.”

“More like a colony,” I said with a grunt.

“Or that, yes. Ponies coming to claim new lands in order to escape tyranny.” He said this through winded breath, the light-weighted bastard. Did all crystal ponies suck this badly at endurance? Had not Ylv, a former member of the Royal Crystal Empire Guards, had any basic training beyond ‘See the stick, boy? See the stick? Go get it!’ And then the large stick was thrown at his face as his instructor spat in his eye and called him a bitch? At least, that’s how I remembered Basic Training.

“I was thinking more along the lines of bacteria.”

“Oh.” He looked at a gaggle of screaming foals, slobbering and probably foaming, as they chased a ball around. A kind-faced mare in robes which I recognized as priestly ones was overseeing them. She looked familiar to me. Ylv heard me pull something out of my bag, and turned his head to look at me.

“I was saving these for Cards, but you’ve earned it,” I said, pulling the little star off the sheet and pinning it to his armor. “That’s for surviving the horrible death sewers.”

He looked at it, and perhaps I was going looney, but he seemed to appreciate it. “But, uh, who’s Cards? You keep mentioning here. Is she the girl you love?”

“Love? Well, if call murdering her BFF before her very eyes, blowing her mother’s brains out with a bullet, and sawing off part of her ear and feeding it to a would-be rapist as ‘love’, then I suppose. Ich hab’ Karten gern. Sounds wrong in any language. I don’t think Cards is allowed to be liked. Even ich hab’ Karten zum Fressen gern sounds off; I doubt Cards can even be enjoyed as a cannibalistic meal. To speak naught of female-exclusive pseudo-cannibalistic lines that somehow imply a form of sex, as the language would kenn it.

“I mean,” I went on, articulating myself with a bunch of pantomiming gestures, “the last time somepony ate a piece of Cards, his body proceeded to liquefy, downright melting before getting mysteriously thrown through a window. And don’t even get me started on the last time somebody pictured Cards having sex.” I made an exploding noise to accompany the gesture of trying to convey a head erupting into a thousand bloody pieces. “It wasn’t very pretty.”

“Wait, you just made the gesture for… head exploding?”

“Good!” I wiped fake sweat from my brow. “I was afraid you’t take that to mean the stallion or mare had an uncontrollable orgasm because they thought Cards was really hot. Glad nopony is confused. But yeah, you’re dead right and I’m not even joking.”

“How… how is that even possible?”

I shrugged, then licked my hoof and used the spit to smooth out Ylv’s windswept mane. As he tried to avoid me, I explained, “There may have been extenuating circumstances, may it do ya. But rest assured, that man would still be alive today if not for inappropriately timed thoughts of Cards.”

“Stop that!”

“Fine, but don’t blame me if all the girls refuse to speak to you because your hair’s a mess.” I paused to ponder. It was preposterous, the conclusion I drew. “Now that I think about it, I killed her father, her mother, and her best friend. That’s like some kind of homicidal hat trick.”

When I looked back up at the shantytown and I saw that priestess talking with what was clearly a pair of mothers. When she stopped talking to them, she bowed her head, and then she glanced my way. Our eyes met.

“Nooo!” she suddenly screamed, turning tail and sprinting away from me as fast as I’d ever seen a pony go. She tripped, rolled in the dirt, and got hit in the face by the ball. It didn’t stop her from scrambling up, looking up at me with terror, and continuing to flee from me.

“What the hell was that about?” Ylv asked as I thought back to the first day I’d spent in Côrint.

“I seem to have a habit of traumatizing mares. But in my defense, she attacked me in a dark alley.” I gave Ylv as a push as we walked into the shantytown, the foals and those two mothers staring at me with confusion.

“Really?”

“Well, I consider all forms of asking for donations to be assault, and respond accordingly.”

“Sedhoas, are you insane?”

“Bitch, if it took you this long to wonder that, you’re the loco one, not I.”

We brushed by a stallion carrying a ton of lumber in a cart, clearly to be used for more impromptu construction projects. Ylv cleared his throat. “So, what, you’re telling me you just wander around the countryside, traumatizing nice mares while pretending to be a hero?”

“Hey, you said ‘hero’, not I,” I said, wondering if that mare I stabbed ever got out okay. For the briefest moment, I forgot which mare I was thinking about (it was Solnyshko), but the mere fact that I had to clarify to even myself was probably a very bad sign. I glanced at the neatly shoveled snow off to the sides of the large road, and all the crappy little shacks just built every-which-where.

After another few minutes or random banter, we finally got to the bridge. The door on the far side was open, and pilgrims were bustling to and fro across the bridge, with a number of armed guards standing watch on either side. In fact, of the two nearer me, one whereof was a big, scary-looking brute with a badass scar across his eye that I was so jealous of. How come he got a super sexy scar, and all I got was to watch mine own eyeball slough out of my skull, eh?

He was the stallion what looked at me and stated in a terse voice. “Pilgrim, none may enter the shrine carrying weapons.”

“Yes, but I can,” I replied, pretty much the utter antithesis of a good idea. “I’m a special snowfluke.”

“Don’t you mean, ‘snowflake’?” he asked in a dull voice.

“No, snowfluke. It’s like a snowflake, only it punches you straight in the dick if you annoy it.” Because, clearly, violence would solve my problems. And yes, I knew that the perfectly reasonable thing to do was explain who and what I was, but sometimes just being a belligerent dick was fun for its own sake. There was always something fun about not properly explaining things to someone in order to eventually make them look like idiots.

He just glared at me. “Let me guess, you’re the Champion of Côrint everypony’s talking about.”

I felt as if I had been a really bitchin’ balloon that just got popped by a sexually confused porcupine. “Wait, what? What’d you know?”

“Well, praise be, they say it be true and I had my doubts, but it really is.” He gave me a smile that should have been considered a war crime. Seriously, had they never heard of ‘toothpaste’ up in the Crystal Empire? “It just stands to reason, what with your attitude. Plus, he does sort of have an official badge of high status within the ranks of the priesthood, though it’s odd for a stallion to have such a rank.” He gestured to Ylv.

“Wait, you mean that little stars?” I asked with incredulity, and he nodded. “For the Allfather’s sake, I bought that from a party story like a month ago!”

The guard shrugged, stepping out of the way. “Well, I suppose we got to get our symbols from somewhere.”

“Somewhence, I glowered as I trudged slowly past him, glaring at him for being reasonable, minus the whole cultist symbol thing.

The ancient bridge was crawling in crystal ponies, and I sort of felt weird not having that unnatural rock-like look to my coat. But at least the bridge had safety rails, which was actually really nice, because for whatever reasons, ancient civilizations (you know, the ones that tend to leave behind grandiose ruins) seldom ever pay any mind to basic safety.

Par for the course, I supposed, murmurs and susurrations doubtlessly about me surfaced almost immediately. I mean, yeah, I did kind of stand out, with the eyepatch, the duster, the hat, and  the fact that I was a normal goddamn pony, but still. Even before I got to the doors leading to the interior of the mountain temple, I got the whole shebang of the usual crop of “That’s him!” and “It’s him!” whispers that were wont to come whenever you happened to accidentally fulfill some vague prophecy.

Inside was somehow worse. The first room, large and circular in design, was lathered in ponies. There were some seeming to be engaged in prayer before strange statues of folken I couldn’t care less about, for none of their idols here were as cool as the saints we Confessionists worship—holla, Sankt Pyotr, the stallion granted sainthood for his discovery of liquid fire. Hooray for religious elitism.

Many other ponies looked basically like tourists, just here for the sights of so many ponies in so cramped a space. And yes, even though it was large and airy, it still felt cramped. Here, the whispers, which would have been respectful on their own, had multiplied until they came across as a thunderous chorus of voices. The sea of colors, from manes and coats, and from the occasional outfit, gave me the certain feeling that Snechta’s little insurrection was not so little, and I at least had reasonable certainty that her followers ran the gauntlet from beggar to rich.

So many folks fighting for their beliefs, but no doubt being manipulated by the Voice in the Dark, a primus inter pares demonic prince whom legends held to be directly responsible for the devouring of all the other demon princes. Of course, he’d been dumb enough to basically get all of his old followers slaughtered when they invaded—and nearly toppled—the Reich, so he still had a bunch of kinks to iron out in any master plans he came up with. And unlike the Reich’s own Chancellor and King, Korweit probably couldn’t raise money for his army by selling pin-up calendars of himself. (That also serves as my perfectly legitimate explanation of why I have a sexy calendar of Chancellor Bismarck somewhere in my bags.)

Nevertheless, I was fixing to understand the big picture of his plan here so that I could foil it, and that meant I needed to find Snechta. Which meant I had to wade through all the damn ponies slowly coming to realize that I was their blah-blah-blah hero who also blah blah blah sex symbol hurr durr durr boring, uninteresting awed greetings mixed with childish attempts at flirtation.

Through the room I waded, Ylv following along. At this point, I didn’t truly know why he was still with me, since his purpose had been achieved shortly after we crept past though monstrous horrors in the dark depths and found our way to the surface. Although, I reasoned, should any ravenous fans come up at me, I could always just throw Ylv at them, wish them bon appetit, and make a run therefor, so I supposed I’d keep Ylv around for a little longer.

We made our way up the massive staircase into the large rotunda-like cavern. The little central lake with the tiny island in its midst was still here, with the baby tree growing proudly up. Various roads and tunnels and even the façades of buildings—which actually struck me as looking disturbingly similar to those of that underground mall, come to think—promised me a thousand different ways to proceed, each one filled with pilgrims. And only one whereof having Senchta.

“Yo!” I called out really loudly. “Anypony know where Snechta’s at? I got her save-the-world magic thingy, and I want to turn it in for my quest rewards plus the experience points. I’m only three hundred XP from my next level, and I was hoping to hit it by the end of the night.”

The blank stares gave me the idea that mayhap these folks didn’t quite know. “Also, next pony who gawks over me being some sort of mythic champion is going to get one straight to the ear,” I added helpfully, shaking my hoof in no particular direction. I got a weird phantom muscular sensation, that of trying to ball a hand into a fist.

So, I of course did the most rational thing possible: I wandered off, found a door, and kicked it down. “Alright, you sons-of-bitches, I’m looking for the King’s sexy daughter, and I know you terrorists kidnapped her!” I accused in a voice so gruff that I exploded into a coughing fit.

Beyond the door was a sizable room which resembled some sort of small library. There had been a number of ponies in robes writing down in books, so I supposed they were scribes. Of course, they stopped writing them I burst in and then immediately shattered a large clay pot with my hooves.

“There’s no random stash of free money in these,” I declared dramatically. I grabbed another pot, threw it against the wall, and said, “This is how people earn money whence I come! Hi-yah!”

I dodged a vicious blow from a nothing and rolled on the floor. Then I rolled again and out of the room, shooting up to my hooves. “Well, that was a bust. Anypony up for a game of eenie, meenie, minie, die?”

Welp, those stares looked even more baffled. There were so damn many thereof that I felt I could just line them up and use them to ascend to a higher floor. When I elaborated this thought to Ylv, he just shook his head and stated he was feeling pretty darn embarrassed for me. I told him we Teutsche call that “Fremdscham”.

It also had a verb form, Fremdschämen, which I then used. “Ylv schämt sich fremd für dich.” Of course, by that point I’d returned to my normal way of speaking, but I swore that my voice always got a noticeable bit gruffer when speaking Teutsch. Or perhaps speaking Equestrian just made me more soft spoken.

Or mayhap I was just hearing things. That was always a possibility I’d never felt safe to rule out.

Eventually, a crystal mare—wearing a hat that had clearly been designed for rabbits—stepped forth, her mauve mane done down in several visible braids. “Sedhoas,” she said, her mouth clearly moving to tell me something useful, but the only thing that came out next was, “ummm…”

That had something to do with me putting a hoof to her hat and slowly pushing it over and onto the ground. “There. Now you look much better,” I added offhandedly as I nicked the hat into my bag. I had the strangest premonition that it would come in handy at some point.

The mare, however, didn’t seem to notice, as she was too busy blushing and suddenly acting really shy. I supposed that, given my apparent status as some sort of “sex god” or whatever prophesied thing I was supposed to be this week, that absent-minded, utterly meaningless remark must have meant a lot to her.

I cocked a brow. “Going to assume you came to inform me where Snechta is, aye?”

She nodded.

Then I smiled and said in a low voice, “I’ve always wanted to say this!”

“Um, say what, sedhoas?”

I sucked in a deep breath and shouted as loudly and authoritatively as I could. “Mare, take me to thy leader!”

The large stained glass windows of this chapel allowed in copious sunlight, the light taking on in places the colors of patterns of the mastercrafted glass. Despite being a part of a mostly underground fastness, parts of the high levels of the temple did indeed stick out of the mountain. But with the mountain covered in snow and tall trees, one could be forgiven for forgetting to scrutinize every odd bit of color one might see upon the side of the great mound of earth and rock.

Ylv elected to remain outside as I entered the inner sanctum. At the end of the little red carpet which marked with room’s center was a statue dedicated to whom I supposed was Chêngrêla. The supposed goddess came in the form of perfectly sculpted mare with glowing blue crystals in her eyes, a grim look on her countenance, a staff held in one hoof, and a oddly snake-like tail poking out from her robes. At the foot of this statue knelt Snechta. The mare had engrossed herself at some point in her prayers—or, I supposed, had fallen asleep—and didn’t react at all to my entrance. I noted a door off to one side, near Snechta, but otherwise my focus fell mostly on the glass.

I figured that if Snechta was waiting for me to speak, I could at least mildly inconvenience her by refusing to do so. Likewise if she was asleep, I would just refuse to wake her, and instead root through all her things for that inevitable Voixson she must have kept that detailed all her secret plans, which, knowing how smart ponies in this part of the world had proven so far, would be labeled “Top Secret Plans: Do Not Listen—This Means You!” But this pony played by nobody’s rules!

Of course, whatever thoughts I had trailed off as I recognized a fair number of symbols and things on the stained glass. There was an image on a tired-looking stallion leading a great host of ponies from a icy land, and another with that same pony settling down, with castles and cities springing up. I saw crosses. This all followed by this same stallion, now in armor, shaking hooves with a crystal mare in red regalia, corpses of defeated foes surrounded them. “Nwlcor” was written on this glass

Then I saw the pale stallion with a mane so blond it appeared white pictured in one, wielding a mighty blade and driving back strange beasts of hellfire and darkness. A name had been inscribed above him in the glass. “Alowichys.” It was an odd way of a name I kennt well, Aloysius, and pronounced as Ah-loi-zee-uws.

The rest of the glass, most of the windows actually, seemed to be dedicated to this stallion and other figures in his story. A golden horseshoe flew above a happy kingdom, the stallion resting in a steel throne, crown on head, sword hoof.

Then one of crystal ponies looking on in apparent apprehension of a white mare with whites and horn, Aloysius stand betwixt them, defiantly facing the mare, all with a dark symbol and figure off in the corner. The symbol three legs, curled as if running and with dark crystals sticking out, the angled limbs forming a rough triangle. Thereby stood a crystal pony figure in dark robes. This frame had two lines, one reading “Sol Invicta”, which struck me as grammatically incorrect Latein, and the one below it being simply “Naîtecer”.

“Studying old art?”

I didn’t jump. Jumping would have been dramatic, and that was clearly the exact reason why Snechta had chosen that time to speak. “Studying? Nay,” I said. “More like staring blankly thereat.”

“I figured this room was not inappropriate for a meeting of sorts, no?” the white mare with the raven black mane asked, nodding to the glass. “A little three-eyed birdie told me a little something of you: your blood runs to the Nwlcor, our ancients friends and brothers-in-arms. And the Goddess sends us faithful an unbelieving champion from time to time, as a way of redeeming those cursed to spend eternity in ignorance of Her truth.” She then basically rehashed Erysa’s bit about that connection have some prophetic meaning while I imagined myself trying to defeat a hamburger in a battle of wits, and losing.

I only paid Snechta mind when she gave the art a wistful sigh and said, “They, your ponies too, I suppose, had such interesting symbols and ideas. I heard they had these great wooden crosses they would erect, dually in a form of service to their God and to punish the wicked. They used to do this to traitors and other vile scum.”

“You know what, I’m just going to stop you there.”

“Why?” she asked with obvious puzzlement.

“Because if you go any further on that tangent you were clearly about to be gone on regarding you appreciate for a torture method of torture/execution, you might as well throw your arms wide apart and shout, ‘I’m evil!’ It’s like saying, ‘Castrate…  Castrate… Man, I love the sound of that word’.” I shook my head. “Read a goddamn book, Snechta. Also, your big holy thingy has a pretty annoying typo.”

“What?” This was clearly not going as she had envisioned it. Good.

“It says up there, ‘Sol Invita’. Soul een-week-tah. And that’s wrong. Sol is a masculine noun, but your glass-maker declined the adjective in the feminine gender.” I nodded sagely. “Therefore, it should read Sol Invictus, the invincible or the unconquerable sun, which might be the latter, given as how I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be Princess Celestia. The word sun, however, is a feminine noun in Teutsch, and,” I went on with a shrug, “I suppose the same is true for Old Equestrian, since the two languages are really close relatives. Odd that she’s wearing clothes here, as I’d pretty much come to think of her as bare-ass naked, like nigh everypony else here is.”

Snechta took a step back. She had apparently gotten rather near to me as I was staring at the windows, so it really didn’t mean much. I simply cocked my head a few degrees and said, “But enough about that business. I’m here because I just spent a few days in a magical doorway thing and it left me something’d or other, but now I have it.” I pulled out the Calêrhos book and offered it to her. She quickly snapped it up with an expression that was somewhere between a grin, laughter, and a grimace—and whatever it was, I didn’t want to see it ever again.

“You found it! The holy Calêrhos!” I swore I saw drool.

I raised a brow. “Yes, now keep your panties on and your crotch dry, I’m here strictly for business.”

“But… I don’t wear panties,” she added with confused dismay.

I threw my hooves up. “Great! So we’ve failed step one already. Are you happy with yourself?” She just looked at me, and I shook my head. “Look, keep your happiness to yourself, and if I so happen to smell a leak, I’m taking that book and going home, capiche? ¡Bueno! Now use your witchcraft, allow me to revel in my defiling all I’ve held sacred, and make me whole once more.”

“Whole?”

I jabbed a hoof at my eye, raised my hat to show the nasty forehead scar, and then made some odd gestures with my hooves. “You know, I once was a unicorn; and once upon a time, my right arm wasn’t technically on loan from an unholy abomination the likes whereof your pitiful little thought-box you term a ‘head’ wouldn’t even be able to comprehend! So, I have been through enough shit to get this far, I just want to get my body all back to normal, take a nap, eat a bagel, and then probably get forced to save the world from, I don’t know, a throng of sentient, pony-eating thongs or something equally retarded.”

“Umm, that might be a bit hard.” When my glare intensified, she shrank back. “I mean, I don’t exactly know how to do that.”

“What.”

“Well, y’see… Uh, heh…” She opened the book and randomly thumbed therethrough. “I can read it, and I know that a great healing spell is in here somewhere, no doubt, but I actually need to find it first.”

“And?”

“And, that may take a while.”

I walked up to her, pressing my chest her. With my height, she practically had to stare vertically upwards to meet my lone eye. “Then make finding it thy highest priority,” I said in a low, slow voice, that kind of voice that just radiated threat despite sound only too calm.

“Y-you don’t understand—”

“No, I kenn it very well, do it please you.” I grunted. “I am a very patient stallion, Frau Snechta, and I’ve come too long to blather away. You will find this spell, today. You will use it on me, today. I will become as I once was, my limbs good, my horn working, and eye reborn, and nought else. Are we clear?”

“I… yes, yes we are.”

I sighed. “Aww, now I hate you for ruining all that buildup.”

She swallowed hard. “Wait, why?!”

“You were supposed to answer with crystal.”

It took Snechta a second to register all thereof. When she did, she gave me the single most forced laugh I’d ever heard. “Ah, so, you’re not so, so upset?”

“Me, upset?” I said with a smile, and laugh. My hoof came down on her throat as I swept her arms out from under her. In an instant, I was pinning her to the ground. “Oh, I’m positively livid, can’t you tell?” I went on in that same jovial tone, my countenance bearing a jolly expression. “Because if you can’t find such a spell in your book, I’m going to flat out murder you. Slowly. With a spoon!”

She squeaked in terror.

“Now then. I prithee say me and say me true: are we clear?”

“Cr-crystal, Champion.”

I pattered her twice on the cheek and stood up. “Good girl.”

Water was nice on damaged flesh. Hot water, sometimes so, often not. But right now, as I relaxed in the large hot springs chambers, its doors barred to the public, the water kept absurdly fresh via little talismans, it did feel so good. It was well lit, that much I could see, aside from the steam rising up, which felt good on my recently self-sewn left eye. See, in order to keep nigh-boiling water out of my skull, I had to sew up my eyelid all good and watertight again.

My gear was all up on the the dry, solid side of the room, and so I rested naked in the water. It felt good to cleanse oneself after so much grime and sweat and blood. The only downside was that all this peace and lonesome quiet gave me too much time to think, which was an act usually reserved for moonlight balconies, as hot springs were traditionally used for checking out mares and experiencing poorly written dialogue laced with thinly veiled sexual tension.

I took a moment to reflect on my pleasant loneliness, and it dimly occurred to me as I sunk my head lower and lower into the water that, given my apparent status amongst the crystalfolken, were I a weaker stallion, my life would have gone from stupid possibly heroic quest all the way into a stupid excuse for a porn novel. I was glad I was me, and doubly so that I wasn’t Cards. Likewise, it was good to feel so clean.

Then came the sound of the door opening up, a door which shouldn’t have done that, as I had left instructions not to let anyone else in here, and then I had put Ylv on guard with the nerdiest, most adorable looking guardsmare I could find, ensuring hours of them just standing there together in awkward silence.

“Look,” I called out, semi-submerged, my eyes closed, “if you’re here to kill me, please take a number and wait until it’s your turn in line.”

“I’m not here to kill you,” said an all-too-familiar voice, that refined, upper-class Southern accent. “You know, Special Agent Faust, you’re an exceptionally hard stallion—”

“Duke Elkington!” I charged, flailing around in the water like a dying porpoise. “You’re not in the script!” I looked up from the water to see the white coat and amber eyes of the Lord of Songnam. His black mane looked as it always did, clean but with those two braids that suggested that wilder side, which made sense, seeing as how his demesne capital was also hight Song City. “And now you’re a… a crystal pony? Well, there’s a plot twist.”

“Just a bit of trickery, a few abuses of spells here and there,” he said as he climbed into the water, leaving his towel on the dry lip of the springs. Being that we were both now naked in a hot spring together, I had the strangest notion that this whole ordeal had been concocted by fangirls. “Felicitat is ever so wondrous with that. My, am I glad you sent her on my way.”

The springs in this cavern were very large, clearly going deeper the further you went into the cave, with bits of natural pillars prodding into the water here and there. I was resting against one such stalag-thingy, facing Elkington now. I could have gone deeper, even hid from the Duke, but I just remained there.

“I must say, I do prefer you with your eye and horn, Agent Faust.” He smiled at me in that lordly manner which doubtless would’ve made any mare feel the need to put on a new, dryer pair of panties. Elkington shrugged. “But if that’s your style, who am I to judge?”

Tilting my head to the side, I asked, “What are you doing here, Duke Elkington?”

He popped his neck joints, and his smile grew at least four notches creepier. “Well, you know me, always endeavoring to save my country and the ponies within her. I may have had to work with the vile and do evil, but the secrets we uncovered from the Devil’s Backbone proved rather helpful. Wherever the wicked are, rest assured, we will purge them. And see here…” He leaned forwards, and I had the sudden mental image of a mare with a short skirt sitting backwards on a chair in order to expose something. It wasn’t very pretty, because it actually had scaly tendrils, but my mind came up with the most routine of things.

“All’s not right in the Crystal Empire. And try and persuade and even threaten as I like, Shining Armor refuses to cooperate. You’d think that a stallion whose wife and sister are both princesses would listen to the nice Duke telling him there’s darker forces at work here, but no. I personally believe he simply holds me in contempt for whatever reason.”

“Elkington,” I said flatly. “You’ve made it clear you hate me very much. You’re here for a reason. I prithee say it me.”

“You sound so much like our fair Tsukihime,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve just been conducting my own investigation of this dark spot in the north, and very disconcertingly you show up all too often.”

I threw my head back and let out an exaggerated yawn. “Snechta is getting supplies and help from the Voice in the Dark, Korweit, who’s basically the closest thing to the metaphorical Devil as there is; Snechta noted something about him promising to conceive with her some dark messiah after all is said and done; and I’m just here to fix the body I ruined fighting the Devil’s Backbone.”

He blinked. “Well. I had… expected needing to coerce you before you told me anything.”

“Why?” I asked with a shrug, emphasizing the hw sound in mockery of his accent. “In almost every case in fiction, withholding information from someone with a similar agenda has disastrous results. I’ll just tell you flat out that unless I can stop Korweit, the Crystal City is going to be the crown jewel in a demonic empire or something. I’m just trying to get deep enough into Snechta’s whacky cult so that I can figure out exactly what Korweit wants. You want in?”

The good Duke let out a long breath, blowing away the steam around him as he leaned back in thought. “I knew there was something dark deep under the city, Felicitat felt it, and I’d be an idiot if I didn’t immediately connect it to the fairly rapid rise of an insurrection here. I’ve been running fields ops to try to gather information, but this… is… unnerving.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot. Usually from mares,” I added helpfully. We both sat there in awkward silence. Obviously, Ellie here had had something he’d been fixing to say, but whatever it was, I’d utterly derailed it.

“And you’re sure about this involving a demon?” he asked. I made an expression that told him just what I was thinking. “Right. Then…” He tapped a hoof to his noggin. “Were I to confront Cadance and Shining Armor about this bit of pertinent information, well… Shining Armor has a certain thing against me, probably something to do with me having offended him a good many years back.”

“I get the sense he’s easily offended. What’d you do?”

“Oh, well, I insisted upon the factual truth—”

“As opposed to the factual lie and the disingenuous truth?” I prodded as he spoke. He ignored me. This saddened me.

“—that my Caroleans were better than his royal guards. Er, this was back when he was captain of the Royal Canterlot Guards, and so he took that as a personal offense.”

“Like a bitch,” I added helpfully. Then I cocked my head to the side. “What’s your plan here?”

He gave me an odd look. “To prevent harm to Equestria.”

“Bo, that’s more of a mission statement than a plan. Try again. Be specific.”

The Lord of Songnam jostled himself in the water, popping joints. “Fine then. I have my elite-most Caroleans doing secret assignments in the city, trying to uncover proof of things here going wrong. There’s a crisis brewing here, and I am to prevent it. Shining Armor doesn’t know how to play the game he’s playing, and for the same reason he sucks at chess: he plays defensive too hard. It was his fault the Royal Wedding, his own damn wedding, went so bad. And he only barely scraped by when he and his wife attempted to hold the Crystal Empire against King Sombra.”

“Whereas you like to attack,” I stated.

He shrugged, then hauled himself up to the lip of the springs. “I defend offensively. That policy of being highly proactive has averted countless crises. When Armor receives a threat, his idea is to turtle up, letting the bad guy do whatever he—or in that case, she—wants. When I get one, I investigate who sent it, where it came from, and we eliminate the threat with extreme prejudice. I call it ‘Search and Destroy’.”

I cocked a brow. “You want to put on that towel? Your dick’s kind of just staring at me with this really dopey expression.” He put on a sudden look of horror as he stood up and wrapped the towel around himself. “In fact, why’d you even get in the springs? You could have just stood up there and chatted me up.”

He just avoided the question. Like a bitch. “I wish to do things all legally here, and I need official permission to carry out any operations in the Crystal Empire, which I am already sort of doing. With some evidence, I might be able to get Canterlot to force Armor and Cadance to work with me, thereby allowing me to take a proactive stance from the shadows. You know, being able to legally detain folks and carry out interrogations, search and seizures, break into bad guys’ houses and investigate—stuff that’d be illegal for me to just do without local sanctioning.”

I swam up towards the lip, a frown on my face. “And my part in all this?”

One of his ears fell flat against his head. “Well, truth be told, I came here to basically get by force if needed the information you just up and told me. You’re in the middle of all this, and I figured that was no coincidence. I suppose, to my chagrin, we’re on the same side now.” There was visible disgust in that tone, which made me giggle like a schoolfilly.

Oh no, Jericho-sempai, I totally don’t like working with you… I don’t… It’s not like I like you or anything, because I totally don’t… I imagined a suddenly cartoonish Elkington in a skirt saying to me, a blush on his face.

“With your information, though,” he said as if to himself, “I can focus my investigations less on proving something funny’s going on here, and more on finding out what this Corvite fellow is after.”

My eyebrow twitched. Korweit sounded odd in his Equestrian accent.

He went on. “I don’t suppose you’d help me, or even supplement my efforts, with a letter to Canterlot about all this?”

“I’m not going to help you write a love-letter to Celestia!” I snapped. “But if you want my help, I recommend you stop being really creepy towards the dame.”

“I am not creepy towards Celestia!” he shot back, and then quickly recomposed himself. “Actually, Celestia was… not my exact intention. I had hope to reach the younger sister. While I always trust in Celestia’s judgement, her usual methods here, I feel, wouldn’t work so well. Twilight is Armor’s sister, so she’d likely listen to him more than me.”

“I don’t know what a time of day has anything to do therewith,” I said in a blank voice, “but what I gather is that you think the younger sister—Luna—is either more manipulable, more stupid, or both, and will let you basically have you way with Côrint.”

The good Duke, to his credit, made an effort to cringe at that statement. However, it didn’t change the fact that he then gave me a hesitant nod. “Luna is a bit more rash and impulsive. My methods, I feel, would be more appealing to her, and should I explain to her why I wish not to consult her sister, I’m sure she’d agree.”

And so it came to pass that Elkington and I wrote a pair of letters. Because I was a subtle dick, I made used bits of mine own language in the letter, usually rather informal phrases sure to offend her, if she spoke any Teutsch (such as opening the letter with “Liebe Fräulein Luna”, and ending with “Viele Grüße und Küsse Ἰεριχώ A. Φαυστ”).

Elkington had a number of Caroleans on staff here with him, all of them like him done up to look like crystalfolken. I even got to see Felicitat again. Briefly. I got too close to her all too suddenly and she jumped up like a cat and skittered around to behind the Lord of the Song City, shivering as she looked over at me.

I was informed curtly that Ellie boy would be keeping in touch if he found out anything, and that the same was expected of me, hence why I was given a PO box number in the city. I guessed it was to deliver notes or something, but I was already planning to fill it with strawberry jam and freshly shaven squirrels.

When all was said and done, we went our separate way. I found Ylv, bitchslapped him for about three-and-a-quarter minutes straight for letting Elkington get through the door, and then set about reading a collection of books dedicated to the flora all over Equestria as I waited for Snechta to find that damn spell.

I was finishing the last book in my botanical set for the fourth time when the escort arrived. The official library in the temple was impressive, and stocked with fairly recent tomes, many whereof even in Equestrian, like those I was reading. On the little table left to my reading-chair had originally been some book about spellcraft, and after about an hour of staring thereat, I’d tossed the book away. The last thing I needed at this point was to poison my mind with dangerous knowledge.

Mayhap a few times I’d fallen asleep whilst reading, and since this room had no windows, I wasn’t sure of the time. And for some reason, I didn’t check my watch. But at least now I had a comprehensive understanding of plants from the Crystal Empire to the Wild West to the southernmost reaches of Equestria and the Thousand Isles: I knew what to and what not to eat, which plants to use to create deadly poisons, and, most importantly, which plants looked hilariously like penises. What? Those things exist and they are the best things ever.

“Sedhoas,” the mare said. It was the same one whose hat I’d stolen earlier.

With an interested look, I set aside my reading glasses. Then I realized that I had perfect 20/eyepatch vision, and that I didn’t own a pair of reading glasses. As I was fervently wondering whose glasses those were, why I’d stolen them, and when I’d put the pair on, the mare went on.

“Mêlenatra Snechta has requested your presence. She says she ‘has the spell’, but that there’s a slight complication.”

“Of course there is,” I said with a sigh, taking the glasses with me because I felt I looked nifty in them. “If this requires some sort of sexy ritual, I’m just going to stab her a lot until she finds a better way.”

“I prithee say me and say me true,” I demanded in a gruff voice as I stomped into the ceremonial room, “what be thy complication?”

The room was kept surprisingly well-lit via a great number of candles. Runes had been inscribed all over the floor and walls and ceiling, and there was a very clearly indicated star in the center of the room wherein I supposed I was meant to stand. I avoided stepping thereinto like the plague as I spoke to the High Priestess of the Cult of Chêngrêla.

Snechta wasn’t the only pony here. And as the door closed behind me with a heavy thud, I looked at the six other mares, each clad in robes and wearing ceremonial masks that just gave me the urge to up and murder them. Snechta was the only one whose mask was slid up so that I could see her crystal face.

“Spell, rusty, shaky, but performable,” she spat out in a pleasantly laconic tone. “Need reagents. Rare ones. I was getting everything ready, and then I saw this part. We need blood. Special blood for healing normal blood. See?”

“So go out and buy your rare animal, kill it, and heal me. I’ve got the dosh; I can fund you. Just do it!” My eye twitched. As cool as the eyepatch was, I was getting tired of the cyclops look. At the thought of having to spend much more time on this endeavor, I felt phantom muscles trying to clench hands into fists as I grit my teeth.

She took in a breath, held it for five seconds, then exhaled hard. “We require a pony’s blood. From a particular kind of a pony.”

“A syphilitic pony with a clown wig and a scar on his face in the shape of a banana?” I pounded a hoof into its twin. “I knew I should have kept Jojo around!”

“We need royal blood,” she said, refusing to meet my eye.

“Okay, so just give me a bucket, and I’ll go beat the shit—er, the blood, I’ll go beat the blood out of Shining Armor and then milk him. We’ll get dairy products and royal blood.”

“He’s only a prince by marriage, not by blood.” I grunted, and she went on. “We need proper royal blood. Like… that of an alicorn or of a king or an heir to a throne.”

I cocked a brow. “Going to guess that Celestia doesn’t donate to the blood bank whenever it rolls into down, right?”

“What’s a blood bank?”

“It’s a shadowy cabal run by Dracula and his minions,” I dismissed.

Snechta fidgeted, pawing at the ground in shame. She was acting like a domestically abused housewife, and that wasn’t cool. “Sombra,” she muttered. “His blood would be perfect. The ritual demands that kind of blood specifically.”

I was so goddamn close to fixing myself. I was gnawing on my lip in furious thought. “And if you just had that one thing, you could do the ritual?”

“I… I think so, yes.” She bit her lip.

I threw my hooves up. “Aw, to the ninth level of Hell therewith!”—and took out my knife and slashed a deep furrow in my shoulder. I holstered the blade. “There,” I said without flinching from the gush of crimson. “Take mine and use it.”

“But you’re no—”

“Look, it’s a stupid book. Blood is as blood does.” I snorted. “Mine’s nothing special, just… I don’t know, I am the king of hats by right of sexual conquest.”

“That’s not good enough, you’d need to really be either a king or the heir to a throne!”

“Use it, you infernal witch!” I snarled. “Use it or I’ll ensure your little cult here dies by fire as is the fate of all sinners!”

My tone was enough to jump her into shaky action. She stepped forwards, and so did the six other mares. They pressed their hooves, one at a time into the wound. I won’t bother going into detail about the blood or how it was pouring all down my arm. Snechta, her hoof bloody, made a cross over her lips. The other mares raised their masks and did the same.

Although I wasn’t aware thereof at first, there was a vile, toothy grin on my face caused by their looks of terror and fear. I could just taste the horror of the others, witness in their subtle, hesitant motions, and of course their faces betrayed the emotion all too well.

I took up a place on the central little star without having to be told. Snechta consulted her book, then looked back up at me. “Please, I implore you, Champion, don’t!”

I grabbed my eyepatch and threw it to the ground. It didn’t really do anything, but it felt cool and dramatic. “Perform it. Or die.” I glowered, and she swallowed.

The mare burst into quiet chants and stilted, nigh-mechanical movements. Heathen dances, of course. Then I paused, reflecting on how impatience seemed to suddenly turn me into a racist. Bad Jericho, bad.

Snechta’s words came clearest to me. Her voice quaked so much it was as if she was experiencing the vocal hells of puberty. The words she spoke had a certain cadence and rhythm that didn’t quite work in anything but her own tongue, Mijôra. But, through the magic of pagan witchcraft, I somehow understood her. Or maybe that had something do with all this blood I was losing. Anypony else feel woozy?

The spellforce made the runes glow with a hellish light. It encircled me, and I felt myself rising into the air, because a dramatic spell wasn’t complete without it causing utterly unnecessary levitation.

I let out a scream mixed in rancorous laughter as hot, eviscerating waves of purest agony shot through me, from the tips of my mind to the broken ends of my hooves. It felt like being crucified mixed with being frozen to death on the moon. It coursed into my left eye socket and my horn with ardent fervor befitting of a mad beast.

In a flash of power and light, it was suddenly all over. I fell to the ground, blinking as parts of my body seemed to steam and come off in hot vapors. It felt pleasant. Like the feeling of finally finishing that goddamn quest.

And then were was nigh silence. Just me, my gruntings, and the hiss of cooling steam.

“It… did it work?” Snechta asked in a timid voice.

Did it work? Well, there was still that issue of blood. I’d said that blood was blood is blood will be blood. That wasn’t exactly true. I’d read enough to know that even though there was no way of telling blood apart as far as I could kenn regarding royalty or whatever. But  somehow ancient spellmakers were the masters of being dicks, and so their magics knew whether or not the blood they had really meant anything. And odds were that this spell knew whether or not it had its sang real.

But that doesn’t answer the question. Did it work?

“Oh, he’s stirring?” She gasped. “By Chêngrêla, I can’t believe you’re even alive! I was sure that would kill you, even before we used the wrong blood! Uh, it worked, right?”

“Thanks for informing me after the fact. But you want to see if it worked?” With a wicked laugh, I stood and locked eyes with the High Priestess, flexing my right arm. “Well, let’s find out, as C’s arm always did refuse to do one particular thing.”

I slugged her straight across the jaw with my right arm.

As she clattered to the ground, her lip busted, I had the strangest feeling ever: an overwhelming urge to apologize to her. Then came the white-hot pain that ravaged my skull. I grabbed my head and fell to the ground screaming.

Usually, this is the point whereat the hero goes black; they pass out.

But of course, being real life, that didn’t happen. The pain didn’t go away, I never lost consciousness, and I screamed until my throat was so raw that I was hacking out blood.