//------------------------------// // Chapter Six: My Masquerade // Story: An Icy Existence // by Dee Bee Doo-wop Cooper //------------------------------// An Icy Existence Chapter 6: My Masquerade Written by DigitDaemon Edited and partially Authored by Lord-Commander Rainbow Dash took a deep breath and slowly let it out, taking in the calming, cool, and somewhat peaceful smell of the library. “One, two, three, four…” She continued to count her paces as she walked away from the window she had destroyed only a few minutes ago. Despite what other ponies thought, flying was a fairly complicated process, and although Rainbow Dash would never admit it, it took a fairly complex knowledge of both the practical and theoretical to get things right. Everything from the awesome aerial manoeuvres of the Wonderbolts, to simple banking and landing. You had to factor in weight, wind resistance, size, aerodynamics, distance, and speed in order to get things right. And, well, Rainbow Dash let out another breath as she stretched her wings, she couldn’t afford to screw this up. There was something important she had to do. Ponies she cared about were in trouble and some of them were actually fighting. Ponies needed her and she had to help. For Ponyville, her friends… Twilight. The thought of the alicorn made Dash grin. “If only you could see this, Twilight.” A single flap, a gathering of as much pegasus magic as she could gather, and Rainbow Dash shot forward. Books, papers, everything in the library flew across the other side as she cleared the room in less than a second, and right through the broken window. By the time she hit the roof lines of Ponyville, she had broken the sound barrier. The sudden boom rocked and echoed throughout Ponyville. But Dash wasn’t paying attention to that. Her attention was on the cloud house on the other side of Ponyville.  Twilight had heard the stories of Celestia’s battles. They had spoken of her grace and beauty on the fields of war, and also of her terrible majesty and power. To hear the stories about her, and then have lessons on math that afternoon with her. Well, Twilight could never quite link the two; the princess and the Dawnbringer. But to actually see it. The stories did not do Celestia justice. It was awe-inspiring. It was terrifying. The singing sound of a blade cutting through the air snapped Twilight back to reality, and into a very real danger. She parried a couple of strikes from a ghoul, and then thrust her own sword into it. She yanked the blade out and threw it as hard as she could at the next row of her attackers. As the blade sailed through the air, Twilight disappeared and ended up next to Celestia, firing any spell she could think of into the advancing undead. “What now?” Celestia countered by tossing her hammer in a boomeranging arc and crushed several of the spider creatures that had been creeping up behind them. “As long as they are focused on us and not Ponyville, then we are doing what is needed.” Twilight nodded and fired another beam into a ghoul. This time, the ghoul still stumbled a few steps before exploding, washing the street corner around it with magical flames. As if summoned, her sword came flying back to her, and once again fell into the comfortable grip of her magic. “I can’t do this much longer!” Celestia nodded and closed her eyes. The sun above them responded, the light becoming brighter, and the air hotter until a faint boom was heard. The undead around them erupted into flames and ashes. Twilight cried out too until she was swept up by Celestia’s great wing. After what seemed like an eternity, she was carefully placed back onto the ground. Twilight blinked, her mouth hanging open slightly as she looked at the street head still throbbing somewhat from the brief exposure and pain. All the undead around them were gone, but the cries and moans of others closing in was not lost on the alicorn. She turned around to ask the princess about it, but any words of wonderment instantly disappeared. Celestia’s disapproving frown, and hard eyes silenced her, and Twilight couldn’t help but feel like she was under a microscope. “P-princess?” Celestia finally shook her head, bringing around her great hammer and setting it next to her. “That light should not have affected you, but it’s a mystery for another time, Twilight. Tell me, what do we have here?” Celestia asked, sweeping her hoof across the street turned battleground. “Definitely strong necromancy, but at this level the caster, or more likely, casters would have to be nearby,” Twilight replied. Celestia nodded, a smile replacing her frown. “Indeed, Twilight. Now the most likely case is that the source of the necromancy is what is keeping these beings held in existence. Like broken pipes spraying water. What are we doing right now?” “We’re just mopping up the water,” Twilight hesitantly replied, but at the nodding of her teacher, she continued. “It’s not going to stop until the pipes are fixed, or the water is shut off.” Celestia nodded again. “Correct, we’re just dealing with the symptoms, not addressing the cause.” Her hammer flew once more down the street with such force and speed that it nailed a ghoul into a wall. “We need to split up.” Twilight rolled to the side as an arrow glided just overhead. “Isn’t that dangerous?” “Very,” replied Celestia as golden light wrapped a small shield around her. “Now I need you to go out and stop the necromancer. I can hold back the assault on Ponyville, and Luna should be here soon with reinforcements from the Royal Guard.” “Wait, why me?” asked Twilight. “With your connection to magic, Twilight, you’ll be able to find the source much faster,” replied Celestia as she turned and faced the next wave of undead. “I am also better capable of withstanding an overwhelming assault, and will provide backup for you, should something go wrong.” Twilight took one more look around the now crumbling street they had been fighting on, even most of the building were starting to show signs of the battle. she let out a sigh and nodded in agreement. “Alright, for Ponyville then?” Celestia gave a simple nod, “For Ponyville.” With a single thrust of her wings, Twilight shot back up into the skies. Rainbow Dash snapped her wings shut and let herself arc the rest of the way to the house, spreading her wings wide at the last second to slow her decent enough to tumble through her bedroom window and right on the cloud bed. Immediately, she rolled up to her hooves and bolted down the stairs to the sitting room below, and smiled as soon she laid eyes on the old wing blades mounted on wall. Rainbow Dash’s great grandfather had been a soldier, a Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force and a member of the one-eight-one, the Stormbreakers. He had fought a hard war against the Griffins attempting to take Northern Equestria in what had become known as the Incursion War. The wingblades were a family heirloom passed down through Dash’s family as a symbol of pride and loyalty to Equestria. Dash couldn’t help but grin as she pulled them off the wall and set to strapping them on. Pegasi trained for years to get use to them, but luckily for Dash, these were simple. Old, slightly rusted and tarnished to a dull grey. But the edges were still sharp, and she could feel the enchantments in the blade begin to power up off of her own magic. She made sure to carefully match up the blades and the metal joints with the ones in her wings. The fit wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be close enough to count. Strapping in had taken a lot longer than she wanted, but as soon as Dash was done, she stood up and gave an experimental flap. The blade joints creaked with each motion, and they were a little heavier than she thought. She tried to close her wings and stopped once she saw how close the blades came to her side. Dash frowned, but there wasn’t anything to do about it now. She looked back out her window and down at Ponyville. She couldn’t quite see Twilight or Celestia, but judging from the slow clustering of undead in the front of town with occasional flashes of brilliant light, it seemed pretty obvious to her where they were making their stand. But it wasn’t enough. The teeming mass of undead, despite the slight hold up, was pushing relentlessly and very much unopposed throughout the town. The faint cries of ponies running out across the bridges heading out of Ponyville carried faintly on the wind. It was then that Dash knew what she had to do.   Twilight twisted and dropped a few feet to avoid the mucus like web that the arachnid undead fired at her. A feat that was much easier with Frostmourne’s instincts. “I am a pegasus you know, or was.” “I suppose that’s why you remind me a little of Rainbow Dash then.” Twilight thought back, off handed, as she focused on the trail of necrotic energy. She could almost see it, as if it was a great spider’s web stretching out through the meadows and fields around Ponyville. Necromancy worked differently than most spells, even dark magic spells. From what little Twilight knew about it, a link was forged between the caster and the dead. This link bent the will of the dead, or undead, to the caster, allowing them to direct it, and be traced with it. For this case, the origin point seemed to have been coming from somewhere within the Everfree. “I wish I had had half as much loyalty as that mare has. She’s stuck to you like honey through all this,” replied Frostmourne after a while. “Yeah, she is the Element of Loyalty after all,” replied Twilight. The thoughts of waking up this morning drifted through her head, for a moment before Twilight managed to regain a hold on her mind. “So, if you weren’t stuck in my head, you would have abandoned me?” “That’s an odd question. This isn’t my fight after all. If anything I’m on the wrong side and would be attacking Ponyville.” “So why do I feel like I am the one that was betrayed by the princesses? I mean, sure, they lied to me, but I have no right to judge them when they were doing what they thought they had to respectively, especially now that judgment has been served.” Twilight considered what she had thought in silence for a while as she continued to scan for signs of the necromancer. She was now flying inside of the dense cloud cover and relatively safe from the webs of the spiders down below. “Frostmourne?” “What?” came the usual gruff reply. “Are you trying to use me?” “Shut up and focus.” Frostmourne shushed her in her head, the irritation in his voice made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it.  Twilight let out an irritated huff and closed her eyes, focusing on finding the spell’s thread work again.. After a few more minutes she finally was able to home in on the center of the necrotic energy, to her magical sixth sense it was like a bubbling, frothing swamp of decay. “Gotcha,” Twilight whispered to herself as she banked towards the source and began descending quickly. “Twilight, wait!” Frostmourne commanded urgently. “You can’t just storm in on the necromancer, even if you catch him by surprise, he is sure to have some sort of trap waiting.” Twilight grunted in acknowledgement and with a swift motion of her horn, winked out of existence and appeared on the ground, within a small copse of trees. Slowly, and with a careful eye, she began to walk slowly towards the hill and the source of the necromantic energy. “Now lets see what kind of traps we might be dealing with.” Twilight reached out with her magic and scanned the area around her target, finding that Frostmourne had certainly been right. There were pressure sensors, chrono fields, attack barriers, even flat out death wards. The amount of spell work had made her pause. “This is crazy.” “Necromancers and their ilk are cautious to a fault, and often paranoid,” said Frostmourne. “Their works are taboo at best and condemning to death at worst. It’s not surprising to see a caster this cautious around their own sanctuaries, but out here?” Frostmourne trailed off as Twilight carefully picked her way around it all. None of the wards were  enchantments that a being specializing in necromancy would be adept at which meant they had to be some sort of pre-made glyph or rune stone network, which just made things harder. All of the parts would have to be neutralized at once or the system could collapse independently and alert the necromancer of her presence. As she crept closer to the circle of enchantments, Twilight felt into the ground with her magic, and  began probing the underside of the rune network looking for vulnerabilities. Thats dumb… He goes through all this trouble to protect himself but it’s just a simple ring around him. A much better system would cover the entire ground he is commanding from and exclude him as a target. That could all be built into a portable rune system to! Amature... Twilight found the small weak spot within the circle, and after a carefully timed overload and a few teleports later, she appeared about half-way up the hill, looking up at the one responsible for the undead army. But what she saw gave her some pause. She had half expected a unicorn, but this being was a scruffy looking goat with glowing eyes, standing within a circle and chanting. He was clad in shredded, decayed looking robes, and what matted, grey fur held old black and brown stains. Twilight figured that at one point, his horns must have been a magnificent set. But now they looked decayed, worn and chipped. All sorts of gold rinks and odd trinkets hung from them, and around his neck was some sort of amulet with a purple stone, flanked by several dead animal skulls. I should have brought Fluttershy, she would have roasted this goat herself. Twilight started advancing on her prey, carefully watching for any reaction. Her sword held by her magic at her side. At about three pony lengths away the goats ear twitched and he ceased his chanting. “Now!” Twilight leapt at him, and swung the blade as hard as she could. The force of her strike sent the goat tumbling toward a ring of traps but he managed to recover and throw himself into the air to land on his hooves. Twilight frowned and sent a pulse of magic into the air. Everything flashed in a aura of purple, especially a domed circle around the goat; a magical shield. “So, you’re the one,” said the goat, stroking his wispy beard with a hoof. Twilight shuddered slightly as he spoke. There was something eerie about his voice. It was calm, but otherworldly at the same time, and for some reason, his eyes were still glowing. “How interesting, Princess Twilight Sparkle, how interesting indeed. I’m sorry, child, but you stole something very important that belongs to my master, and I will be taking it back.” The goat lifted his hoof and a caustic bolt of acid shot forward towards Twilight. “I don’t steal.” Twilight crushed the spell in mid transit. “I also don’t appreciate it when an undead horde tries to kill my friends and then destroy my town.” Twilight almost lost the fight as the necromancer shoved his hoof into the dirt and skeletal hooves erupted from under Twilight reaching and grabbing for her. Startled, she kicked her own hooves up and gave a single, mighty flap of her wings, sending her into the air and well out of reach. Slowly, all sort of skeletons came pushing out of the ground. “Stop it,” said Twilight. “Another pulse of magic came from her horn, scattering the bones all around the clearing. “If you stop this insanity now, surrender peacefully, then I will be sure that it reflects well at your trial.” The goat swiped his hoof through the air, materializing a demonic claw. Twilight tried to roll away but the tip of the claw caught her and sent her plummeting to the ground. “My dear Princess, the penalty for necromancy in Equestria has always been death,” chided the old goat as he hobbled forward “I doubt even your good word could save me from your beloved teacher. And it seems like I’ve won regardless.” The goat casually stepped over to where Twilight had fallen, examining the injured alicorn. To his surprise, where a gaping wound should have been there was instead a thin coat of ice. “What!” Twilight leapt forward, her eyes glowing a bright light blue, and plunged her blade into the goat’s shoulder. He cried out, more from pain or shock, she couldn’t tell. But with the blade still in his shoulder, and using it as leverage, she flipped him over her and slammed him into ground. He writhed on the ground just for a bit until Twilight’s frozen hoof pressed down on his chest. “Some deaths are more merciful than others,” Twilight sneered, her voice mixed with another, both sounding cruel and otherworldly. “And I know so many ways to kill you... Kel.” The necromancer stopped struggling and looked at Twilight with a terrified expression. “Master!?” “I’m not your master, now am I?” replied Twilight, her voice holding both confusion and sinister mirth. “I am a Princess of Equestria,  and by my authority, I sentence you to death.” “M-master,” he sputtered. “Master, please. Spare me. I’ll do wha—” “I am not your master!” The ghostly, vindictive voice cried out from Twilight as the necromancer’s head was cleaved in two. As the light faded from Twilight’s eyes she had to catch herself, Her legs buckling out from under her from the sudden withdraw of power. Her sword slipped out of her grasp and clinked against the rocky floor. “That… that felt terrible” Twilight muttered to herself. She raised her hooves up and looked at them, tears forming in her eyes as she realized what she had just done. She had killed another living being. Not an undead, and perhaps someone who certainly deserved it. But another being. The worse part of it was how easy it was. How— “You did what was necessary. No sense in beating on yourself about it,” whispered Frostmourne. Something within Twilight snapped as she pushed herself back onto her hooves. “You! You did that, all of this didn’t, you!?” Twilight didn’t give the spectre another a chance to explain and rounded on him again. “I will not be a tool for you to use, do you hear me! I will not be a monster, not for you or anypony for that matter! I will destroy you if you ever do that again.”  Frostmourne was quiet for a while, long enough for Twilight to gain control of her ragged breathing. “I can’t force you to do anything,” he replied, as if saying so through gritted teeth. “Why is he dead? Kel, was it? Why did he have to die?” “He was an old fool, bitter and senile, but also dangerous,” sneered Frostmourne, his entire demeanor changed instantly. “The harm he could of caused, the destruction and death! Besides, what is there to gain from imprisoning him, from sparing his life?” “He would have been tried properly,” countered Twilight. “In a court of law, and his sentencing carried out legally.” “And when he escaped? When he comes after your loved ones; friends and family? What then, oh noble princess? Would you be an avenger to a lost soul, a punisher for those who suffered?” “You don’t know that he would do that.” Frostmourne snorted. “Your naivety is amusing, though sickening at times. Clearly, I knew the goat that Kel was. I even know who you are, Twilight Sparkle. Tell me, what would you do for those you care for the most?” “Anything,” she replied, automatically. “Anything within reason.” “Would you kill?” Twilight was silent, causing Frostmourne to let out a irritating chuckle. “I thought so,” purred Frostmourne. “Careful, Princess. That sort of thinking is a very slippery slope.” Twilight gritted her teeth. “Shut up. You know nothing about me!” “I do know one thing about you,” he hissed back at her once again angry and bitter. “I certainly can’t turn you into a monster, only you can do that.” Twilight ignored him. Opting instead to pick the sword up in her magic and fling it at a nearby tree, watching it as it sunk almost to the hilt. She raised her mental shields, blocking off Frostmourne, and closed her eyes to think. Frostmourne might be correct, but there was still too much uncertainty with him. Too much anger and hate. She had absorbed that sword, which she was guessing had acted as some sort of prison for Frostmourne. If that was the cause, perhaps it was the artifact, the sword, that was messing with her. She opened her eyes and looked down at her frozen hooves. She spared a glance over at the old goat before turning and walking away. “Well, it’s over now, anyways,” Twilight said in a mixture of relief and disgust. She was going to find a way to fix this, to end this nightmare once and for all. But unfortunately for her, as she looked back towards Ponyville, the undead did not end the moment Kel was struck down. Where once was an army, an army still was, very much animated and still just as deadly. The one difference was that they had now turned and were descending on Twilight, and she was surrounded.