Chapter 10: Unexpected Exile
Her re-entry into the world was every bit as violent as her brief departure. Space-time folded to disgorge Rainbow Dash and the rest of the unpleasant contents of the bubble into a tree-rimmed glade, with enough force to carve a nice crater into the soft earth. She spat dirt out as she rose back to her hooves and shook her wings off. Overhead, the sky was tinged slightly with the fading colors of the sunset – she must have napped for longer than she’d planned earlier.
“I cannot teleport you closer to his castle,” Ghealach informed her coolly. She was standing a few feet away, her face expressionless.
“Let me guess,” Dash said. “Too much power?”
“Too much interference,” she corrected. “I do not know what is wrong with this place, this…forest, though I hesitate to name this horrific mess of knotted ley lines and warped energy such a familiar name as that, but it is like trying to move though a minefield blindfolded. To attempt to transport you any deeper would have the same chance of getting you to his castle as getting you to the surface of Celestia.”
“…What?”
“Your sun,” she explained patiently. “Celestia. Sol.”
“She is the sun?” she asked, confused. Ghealach nodded.
“I had thought you would be aware of this.” She shrugged. “It is of no consequence. Discord’s castle is less than a mile from this glade – which I chose due to what I anticipated would be the lack of anything larger than you that wanted to eat you.”
“Thanks.” She shivered at the thought of being deposited outside a manticore’s den. “Which way do I go?”
“West,” she answered. “Point yourself in the direction of the setting sun.”
“I know which way west is, thanks, Ghealach,” she grumbled, starting west at a pace slightly faster than a trot but just shy of a gallop, careful to avoid stepping on sticks as she crossed the field – she was far too exposed to even think about making noise. “Is there any chance of you losing contact with me?”
“If what you are asking is if there is a chance you may die from the powder, the answer is no,” she replied, to Dash’s relief. The ferns on the rim of the clearing rustled as she pushed through them; she had to contort herself a little to avoid breaking a dead branch on the other side, but she made it through quietly enough. Past the ferns were more ferns, and then more trees – gnarled and twisted and perforated by rotted holes, with roots that almost looked like they wanted to grab hold of her and yank her into the ground to be digested.
She froze as she blinked and it almost seemed like the shadows lunged at her. They returned to normal almost immediately, but it left her shaken.
I’m hallucinating that shadows are jumping at me, she thought. I guess that’s better than me jumping at shadows…heh.
She swallowed nervously and pressed on.
It was slow going, trying to slip through the Everfree Forest silently. The ground was littered with sticks and branches, covered by dead leaves in many places; she even had to watch out for roots, after stepping on one yielded an echoing report that must have woken up everything between her and Neighpon. The light slowly faded from the sky, surrendering to glittering stars that she caught sight of in snatches between clumps of leaves and dense weaves of branches, until the woods were almost pitch black. Somehow, despite the absence of light, she could see almost perfectly.
“How can I still see?” she asked quietly, pausing with her back to a thick tree she’d determined was free of any kind of potentially lethal insect or – stars help her – spiders. “Is this something you’re doing?”
“I would guess it is a result of the mixing of our auras,” she answered at a normal volume. Rainbow Dash winced slightly at the noise, even as she acknowledged intellectually that Ghealach was completely inaudible to anything in the real world. “Darkness and shadow are a part of me. They are no obstacle to my vision – keeping watch over the night would be impossible otherwise.”
“Anything else I should know about that might happen?”
“We shall deal with that if and when it becomes an issue,” she said. “I would think the widespread contamination and subversion of your aura by a hostile phantom would be a larger issue.”
“I can deal with Cloud Ferry,” she assured her. “I made a deal with her, and she kept up her end, at least.”
“I am going to assume I will not like what your end was,” Ghealach said warily.
“I promised her you would cancel whatever spell you used to hold her there.”
Ghealach visibly ground her teeth together. “You fool,” she hissed. “You have backed yourself into a corner and lit every exit on fire. If you do not abide by this deal, she may be strong enough to force it anyways and be thus enraged – and if you do abide by it, she is freed anyways and will no doubt cause further trouble in the future!”
“So the better idea is to just keep up my end of the bargain and set her free,” she pointed out. “I didn’t have a lot of choice, okay? I needed her cooperation!”
“We could have found a less damaging incentive, perhaps,” she persisted. She shook her head. “I will not free her.”
“So you’re going to just make her angry?”
“She will have to fight for every erg of aura she gains,” Ghealach declared. “I know she can hear me in there. I prevented her from interfering with your perceptions, but I could not isolate them from her entirely. She will not be freed by me.”
“Well, that’s just bucking great,” Dash grumbled. “Do you even care what this kind of stuff might do to my head? Having a phantom running around inside it can’t be good for me!”
“This situation is entirely your fault,” Ghealach said. “If you truly intended to keep your end of such a deleterious bargain, you are beyond help. Bonding you was a grave miscalculation on my part – which I do not intend to make again in the future.”
“If it was such a bad idea, why don’t we just separate now?” Dash snapped irritably. She realized exactly how stupid an idea that was an instant after the words left her mouth.
“Very well.” Ghealach spread her wings threateningly. “If you so wish, we shall go our separate ways. Me to my moon – and you to your grave.” The cold look in her eyes dared Dash to agree. For the first time, the fact that she was completely dependent on this being to live – completely, wholly reliant on her – sank in.
Silently, Dash continued on her trek, focusing on not breaking any sticks to distract herself from her irritable mood. She made good time – better than the first segment, at least – and before too long she was looking up at the crumbling ruins of Discord’s castle once again.
In the dark of night, the ruined parapets and shattered walls looked far more menacing than they had during the day. Threading her way through the outskirts of the ruins, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking through either an immense boneyard, where some manner of great beast came when its life dwindled away to die, or a nest of gigantic predators. The outermost walls of the castle were almost completely shrouded in greenery and vines, invisible from the air but annoying obstacles from the ground, and if they hadn’t been so worn down by time she doubted she could have gotten over or around them – her wings felt like lead at her sides. She was almost certain she wouldn’t be flying too much in the near future. Past that, she tried to avoid thinking about.
The ground between the outer and inner curtain walls was a chimeric mixture of earth and cobblestone, one seeming to merge seamlessly into the other at random intervals. At one point she’d have to step softly to avoid her hooves clicking on the hard rock; at another, she had to practically fight the ground to get her hooves back out so she could take another step. When she finally reached the inner courtyard, her earlier sense of uneasiness at her plan had been completely replaced by relief.
“What is your plan for navigating the interior?” Ghealach asked as they stood before the double-doors that led to the entrance hall. “It is the residence of the Lord of Chaos. Surely, you do not expect to navigate it by memory?”
“Discord has Fluttershy visit him a lot. He won’t change it too much when she’s gone – too much effort,” she answered confidently. “It’s not like too much can change on our route, either – it was just a room, two hallways, and a staircase. How bad could it get?”
“I do not believe you understand the implications of his position,” she replied. She seemed ready to go on, but Dash had enough and pushed open the front door – because that had, in fact, been her plan from the beginning. Walk in through the front door, find the powder, and run. Foolproof.
That assumption disintegrated the instant she could see through the doorway. Instead of the ice-encrusted space she had expected, instead even of the anticipated entry hall, she found a kitchen. The walls were covered with a wide array of pertinent items, and many that were less so – pots, pans, lobsters, lemons, firewood (nailed to the wall), a two-wheeled metal vehicle of some sort with pedals on the sides (likewise), a small tree – when she stepped inside and looked up, all she could see was blackness, far higher above than the castle was tall on the outside. She noticed that there didn’t appear to be a sink in the kitchen, and she guessed that if she flew up the room and checked on the walls, there wouldn’t be one there to be found either. Across the room from the door was a small, square window, open to admit a gentle breeze that stirred the curtains – and to allow brilliant daylight to flow through.
Almost dreading what she would find, Rainbow Dash walked over to the window and glanced through. It overlooked a wide, flat field of grass that extended to a distant, mountainous horizon - in other words, a completely impossible vista.
“Um…” She stepped back from the window. “What?”
“Exactly,” Ghealach responded. She’d stepped in behind Dash; the door slammed behind her, echoing oddly in the small space. On the inside, the doorway was much smaller. “Do you still believe this to be a sound approach?”
“Maybe I should’ve thought this out better,” she admitted reluctantly. She pulled open the door again. “We should head back…outside…”
On the other side of the door was a truly vast room, like a brown monochrome mock-up of Caelum’s hall. The only illumination in it came from the open door. Out in the darkness, she heard something creak.
Slamming the door shut, she retreated back into the kitchen. She could already feel her beleaguered navigational sense stirring itself in weak protest of this latest abuse it had to calibrate for. Shifting interior geometries? Multiply connected spaces? it seemed to ask. Are you serious?
Ghealach gave Rainbow Dash a look that managed to combine “I told you so” and “Now what?” into a single expression. “Our new course of action?”
“Well…” She shrugged. “Not much left to do but try and complete our objective now.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” she asked.
“We start opening doors.” There was one other door in the kitchen, on the left wall. It seemed as good a place to start as any.
------
How long had it been? Hours, maybe? Rainbow Dash had lost track of time as she and Ghealach wound through the seemingly endless hallways of Discord’s castle. Windows were common, true, but they did nothing to help her figure out how long she’d been exploring, as in one room’s windows might show a coldly sunny snowscape, and the next one over a tropical paradise at night. Some doors opened into places that by all rights should not have had any reason to have a door – the inside of a volcano, a clearing in the middle of some kind of pine forest, the narrow space between two walls in an old house. Some doors opened into impossibilities – one exited onto a street in Marexico, with fireworks exploding in the clear night above and multicolored lanterns strung between the squat adobe houses; another, onto the roof of a lighthouse perched on a cliff above a stormy sea, with the light of a grey dawn playing across the crashing waves. The castle seemed to have been designed and built by someone who'd once heard of rationality second-hoof from a friend and hadn't really liked the sound of it.
“This is insane!” she exclaimed, as she walked down a hallway that would have been better suited for a surrealist art museum than a castle. “How the buck are we supposed to find anything in this place? I can’t even find the way out!”
“He rules chaos like a mage rules her own magic. I am certain Discord is perhaps the sole being capable of navigating this mess,” Ghealach answered calmly.
“Can you teleport me out or something?” Dash asked. “There’s no way we’re still in the Everfree!”
“Unfortunately, that statement is either untrue or Discord’s magic is acting in an identical way,” she replied. “Though after a few hours of this, facing a starving beast of the wild may be preferable.”
She grunted in response, shoving open another door. Inside was a square metal room with a large stuffed teddy bear sitting placidly in the middle. It was devoid of any further decoration or exits. She slammed the door frustratedly and continued on.
“There’s no order to any of this!” she protested. “Nothing makes any sense!”
“There is a great deal of order, actually,” Ghealach said. “So far, none of the rooms we have entered have had varying charges of subatomic particles. None of them have had more than the expected four dimensions. None of them have inverted the phase-change temperatures of common chemical compounds. It is chaotic, true, but it is moderated.”
“He’s just toying with me, isn’t he?” she grumbled unhappily. Another door on her right; she shoved it open. Inside was another hallway of arbitrary length, with a vaulted ceiling and columns built into the walls every thirty feet, extending off into pitch blackness. She slammed it and chose to proceed along her lit hallway. “This is his idea of a joke, isn’t it? To let me wander around inside his castle until I starve to death.”
“Perhaps not. There have been doors opening into fruit orchards.”
“They’re probably poisoned or something.” A trapdoor lay in her path. Resignedly, she tugged it open and stuck her head through – and found herself looking up into the hallway of botany experiments from her first visit to the castle. She blinked in surprise.
“It would seem your method, mad as it was, has worked,” Ghealach observed. She was already down in the hall. She glanced down. “Perhaps it is because of its irrationality that it has achieved this degree of success.”
“Awesome!” she laughed, pulling herself up into the hall. “Okay, we’re close. The powder should still be in the pattern we need for a projection, right?”
“Unless he has moved it, yes. I believe our assumption was that he hasn’t.”
“There’s no way in Tartarus I’m trying to go back through all of that,” she declared. The very idea made her navigation sense uneasy. “And we forgot my saddlebags anyways. We’ll just have to perform the projection from in here.”
“This, unfortunately, is the optimal plan,” Ghealach sighed. “You seem to have a knack for forcing typically unthinkable courses of action.”
The plants, thankfully, were asleep – or whatever passed for that amongst plants. None of them stirred or made a sound as she passed them by and snuck up the stairs. At the top, the room beyond the door was mercifully the same. The pattern of powder at the center was unmarred except for a flattening where she’d fallen over into it the first time. Ghealach worked a quick spell through Dash, using microcurrents of wind to reshape the line in that area – and to Dash’s surprise, she could actually see the magic working; not in the sense of a visible glow, which went without saying, but something more. There were hazy suggestions of field-lines moving, glimpses of energy reshaping itself to the Dust Sentinel’s will, flickerings of something mysterious and all-encompassing hidden beneath the dull matter of the real world – something immaterial that squatted just out of her reach and laughed in her face.
“Your magic sense is enhanced,” Ghealach told her, “but not by much. I am attempting to chisel fine detail into a sponge, using a jet of water and looking through grime-caked goggles, from a great distance. It should suffice for our purposes though.”
“Great.” She hopped over the lines and sat in the center of the ritual circle. With her newly-sharpened magical sense, she could see wavering in the air around her, like heat haze, as the sheer amount of power coursing through the powder distorted…something. For the first time, she wished she’d poked through some of Twilight’s books on magical theory, so she could have a name to attach to what she was experiencing. Resigning herself to ignorance, at least temporarily, she closed her eyes and prepared to meditate.
With an echoing snap, the moonlit room was suddenly flooded with light. Her eyes snapped open – the walls were gone! Or they’d turned transparent at least. Whatever the cause, where they had once been now were three beings she had not banked on encountering.
“And here I was, expecting you to take my advice in the sense of running blindly off into the sunset to find a phoenix whose beak you could pulverize!” Discord chuckled from a hovering lawn chair. He was laying on it upside-down, with his legs crossed lazily on the back of it and his tail hanging down below it. “You surprise me, Rainbow Dash! This was a far more reasonable course of action than what I had anticipated. I had plot outlines and character sketches and skills sheets and maps and monster manuals – all useless now.” A sheaf of papers appeared over his head and exploded into multicolored confetti. “Well, you would have surprised me, if you hadn’t spent a while slamming doors in my castle – needlessly rude, you’ve probably bruised them. I’ll be dealing with complaints from the union for weeks. Past that it gave me plenty of time to call a few friends here to make things interesting.” He turned to one of his ‘friends’. “How was the punch, by the way? I squeezed the churchmice myself.”
On his left, Luna looked sick briefly. On his right, Celestia merely sighed.
“Rainbow Dash – “ she started, but Dash simply closed her eyes and tried to tune her out. Abruptly, she felt something like a glass dome slam down around her; her eyes snapped open again.
“She has placed an interdict around you,” Ghealach explained. Her voice betrayed a hint of irritation. “In your words, 'awesome'.”
“I’m trying to get Twilight back, Princess!” Dash snapped, glowering at Celestia. “Drop the spell and let me go!”
Luna shot Celestia a mildly surprised look. Celestia kept her eyes focused on Rainbow Dash. “As much as I want my student back, Rainbow Dash, you are in absolutely no state to retrieve her. Rescuing her and losing you would leave Equestria at just as great a risk as having you and not having her. And have you considered what impact your death while trying to save her might have on Twilight?”
“I’m not dying!” she protested.
“Thou art contaminated terminally by phoenix beak powder,” Luna interjected. “It has been confirmed medically. We are not sure what powers thou didst deal with in thy misadventure, nor are we sure how thou’rt seemingly unaffected by this poison, but the testimony of the chirurgeon is unequivocal. Thy aura is being drained at an unsustainable rate far in excess of thy natural ability to recharge it.”
“Without medical attention, my little pony, you would be dead in days at the most – irreversibly, permanently dead,” Celestia finished. “And that estimate is based on you not drawing upon your reserves for the duration. If you perform this ritual, you will be beyond help. For Twilight’s sake and your friends’ sakes, step out of the circle and let us help!”
“They discount my aid,” Ghealach said. “They think you to be without help of your own right now. All they could do for you to prolong your life would be what I am doing right now.”
“If I don’t go out there again, you’ll never get Twilight back!” Dash insisted. “Discord purposefully sabotaged the negotiations – “
“Me? Why, that’s preposterous!” he exclaimed innocently. Mock-innocently. Surely, they could hear the tone of mockery in his voice?
“ – and Beta won’t listen to anypony!” she pressed on. “She’s probably messing around with Twilight’s memories right now! She did it to me!”
“Beta Centauri is an old friend of mine,” Celestia countered. “She will listen to reason.”
“She hasn’t yet!”
“On this, we are in agreement with her, sister,” Luna admitted. “She did not seem to be a wholly sane individual in our meeting. A more proactive approach may be needed – though not one carried out by Rainbow Dash.”
“Why?”
“Dost thou really need to ask us that?” Luna asked disbelievingly. “Thou didst assault the Starmaker herself! Thou hast proven beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that thou art not fit for diplomatic duties!”
“She was lying – “
“Diplomacy involves a great deal of that, or it did when we last were involved with it,” Luna cut her off. “Lies, half-truths, omissions, equivocation, prevarication – “
“And tact!” Discord added. “That’s a form of lying, I am lead to believe. I’m not a fan of it myself.”
“Step out of the circle, Rainbow Dash,” Celestia commanded. A note of pleading was present in her voice, but Dash still interpreted it as an order. She wondered idly why they simply didn’t try to physically remove her from the circle.
They’re afraid of it! she realized in a flash. It’s the powder! They’re afraid of being poisoned! If I don’t leave it…there’s nothing they can do.
“No,” she answered, stunning them all. “I’m getting my friend back. While you three keep interfering and slowing me down, Twilight’s trapped on Domhan – and I’m not going to let Beta turn her into some kind of alien freak like her just because you thought I wasn’t fit enough to help!”
She ignored whatever Celestia said next in favor of examining her surroundings – not with her eyes, but with her impressionist magic sense. If she focused hard enough, she could sharpen her perception – heat haze became a pattern of ripples, resolving in and out of clarity, and the dome – the interdict – became a blur around her, a hemisphere that distorted everything outside it. When her sense sharpened, she realized that it was a poorly-made thing; the blur became transparent, or almost so, in some regions of the interdict. There were flaws that could be exploited.
Ghealach snorted. “They are attempting to confine a pegasus – magically blind and magically invalid. Cloud Ferry may save us yet.”
“How do I get out?”
“Pick a flaw, focus on resolving it, and I shall open a tunnel through it for you.”
She looked around and tried to find the most transparent area of the dome that she could. It was almost directly above her – a spot so clear that she couldn’t detect any distortion through it. Perfect!
She focused on it to the exclusion of all else, doing her best to keep it sharply in focus – or as sharply in focus as something with blurry edges could ever get. As she watched, she felt an odd sense of tiredness – not physical exhaustion or even mental fatigue, but something else – and the clear spot evened out into a circle and began to widen.
“Project now,” Ghealach ordered. “I cannot hold it open for long.”
She shut her eyes tightly and forced herself to relax. Her mind emptied quickly, thankfully, and she felt her soul separate itself from her body. This time, though, the projection wasn’t unnoticeable – she saw the world recede below her as Ghealach yanked her up and out of the room, slipping through the tunnel with barely an inch to spare to either side of her spark. Blurriness appeared in her hybrid of magic sense and sight, trying to slam shut around her and confine her to Equestria, but this time she wasn’t helpless. Without calling on Ghealach, based purely on half-remembered instinct, she forced the planes of haze aside, knocking them roughly out of her way and splintering them back into the void.
Her magic answered to her and her alone now – she registered Ghealach’s noise of protest as she took control of the tunnel. The pressure on it was enormous, and it began to crack almost instantly – it had to hold up against the strength of an entire sun’s worth of magical effort! What Ghealach had told her back when they first bonded finally hit home. Without her help, there was no way she would be able to defeat Beta!
The battle took place in an instant before she was through. With an elated cry of triumph, she shot quickly up into a dark void. She had escaped her body – she was back in action! Nothing could stop her now!
The tunnel shattered. With the speed of a pair of scissors closing, the interdict resealed itself, twice as impermeable and twice as thick as before. Its edges closed like a guillotine around the silver-gold cord that stretched from Rainbow Dash to her body – around the impossibly thin, incredibly delicate astral tether. The feeling of the interdict irising shut around the cord was like having her head chopped off. The void echoed with a scream of pain. The tether stretched, thinned past impossibility, jerked taut –
Finally, with a blast of pain like nothing she’d ever felt before, it snapped.
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3439434 If I remember correctly, Alpha Centaruri is the star vibrating through a chunk of Crystallized Carbon right?
3439532
It's the closest star system to Earth, as well as being sun-like. I have heard no mention of it vibrating through chunks of crystallized carbon (is that diamond?).
I'm not sure why, but I have the vague uneasy feeling you may be referencing something.
EDIT: Oh, are you thinking of V886 Centauri?
3439584 yes, Crystal Carbon is diamond. Supposedly, there's a star in the Centauri System that's vibrating through it.
V886 Centauri, nicknamed "Lucy" after the Beatles hit: "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"
3439601
Not the system, but the constellation, according to wikipedia. Didn't know they'd actually found any like that - I thought they were merely theoretical. I might have to include an appearance for it at some point, thanks
3439627 Your welcome...
CRYSTAL PONIES!!!
3439630
That...makes a terrifying degree of sense
3439649 Now, I haven't read this yet... and with our talk I want read it now...
Severed astral cord... Isn't that instant death? Either way... This chapter pleases me. ANOTHER! (sorry, obligated to make one movie reference a day.
)
3439655
Well, enjoy! Readers and feedback, critical or non, are always appreciated
3439695
Yep! It's a good thing I don't have a Tragedy tag on this, or some people might get upset (at least one might be elated, but so it goes...).
34397... Moar pls... moar...
Well then. I guess Dash either ascends by the end of the story or dies, right?
You'd think they'd ease off on the block once it was clear she would die before giving up.
OOOohshit, it snapped! That is the worst possible thing!
I'm in love with this story, and the ways you have the stars interact. I wonder, are you gonna show Eta Carinae? And there's something I don't get. You mention that when a star dies, they become mortal until they reincarnate. But what about the star corpse they leave behind? Like, say, Cygnus X-1. Cygnus collapsed into a black hole. Does the star corpse - white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole - remain as a separate entity?
Hmm, so, Celestia is our sun? Or am I dumb? Because Sol is our sun. If that's the case, then damn she made a lot of planets!
Also, is Discord the embodiment of Entropy? It would make sense...
3440694
Out of order:
1) Yep, Celestia the sun is basically our own sun. She got...carried away a little with the planet-sculpting.
2) Discord is the embodiment of Discord - Chaos, moderated somewhat. Entropy is another primal force entirely, as is Chaos - who would be a great deal less friendly to life. Discord is pranks and confusion amongst life, Entropy is the complete breakdown and rendering unto nothingness of somethingness, and Chaos is completely uncontrolled change, up to and including alteration of natural laws and constants. Discord was permitted to stay in the universe, unlike the less moderate embodiments, because he is not actively and always hostile to life like, say, Order or Entropy are.
3) Only one of those really counts as a stellar death for the purposes of reincarnation. White dwarfs and neutron stars persist with their souls still inside, and are seen as either respected elders or cripples to be pitied, based on how they got that way (aging or some form of nova or close encounter with a black hole). They die through gradual fading off into black dwarfs, or however neutron stars eventually end (I'm assuming violent explosions since Wikipedia seems silent on the matter). Black holes do count as a death, and eject the star's soul out into the cycle once more.
For stars that die through non-stellar means - like Alpha did in this story - the 'corpse' remains behind, waiting for the eventual return of the soul, since stars can sustain themselves without magical input from a soul, unlike living bodies. If there isn't a stellar body to return to - as in the case of a collapse into a black hole - then a newborn star from a nebula or other source becomes the host body.
4) Eta Carinae, compared to the other stars I've included, is much, much farther away. It may get a cameo or a reference, but as an actual character, probably not. Sorry
Only Caelum gets to mess around with distances on that scale.
3440963 Black holes will end, too. Hawking radiation and all that.
Mega boom.
3439788That Elated person would be me, Now Rainbow Gets to be a Perma Ghost, Annoying the F*** out of beta and Alpha.
Next chapter will be really fun.
3446711
I just realized how much comedic potential this story could have had...welp, too late now!
3441101
True enough - but to me, they can't really be considered stars anymore, therefore why their formation frees the star's soul.
3441823
Hm...yeah, Twilight and Beta aren't getting off that easily
But that's for another chapter - I'm going to let the suspense (unsure if have actually created suspense. I'll pretend like I have) build a little...
Yeesh, go easy on Rainbow Dash! Some people (namely me) will start to think that you hate her!
Meh. With the existance of souls, death loses much meaning. However, the poison seems to be destroying her soul. That might complicate things.