The Curse of A Well-Read Man

by LeoneHaxor

Chapter 5 - Geared Up (Director's Cut)

Author's Note:

Dark chapter is dark. You have been warned again.

Director's Cut Notes: The original version had a minor continuity gaffe, which finally has been removed for this release. Boy was my face red when I noticed it.

Twilight looked at Setton as they made their way to their second Door. "So you’re saying ponies are just stories in your world?” she asked. “No unicorns, no pegasi, none exist on ‘Earth’ whatsoever.”

“As far as I know,” the boy replied. “I mean, I’ve never seen one in person before, so…”

Twilight paused for a beat. “That means I’m your first,” she stated with a sly smile, one that said she fully aware of the double entendre.

Setton nearly tripped over some of the books in the floor the second that processed. Bass caught Setton before he fell all the way, bending his legs in a way that defied anatomical description in order to stop the fall with its body before it somehow returned Setton to a standing position.

Setton resisted the urge to shiver. He wasn’t sure which was worse, that he was practically alone with a mare on a hair-trigger between immensely curious and fatally nymphomaniacal, or that he was surrounded by crazy eldritch…stuff. It struck him odd that Lee had no issues at all with strolling around in a ludicrously stocked library, petting spiders made of bone and muscle, trusting the motherfucking slender man enough to walk around with him, not to mention a living boombox on black, spindly legs.

Then again, Lee had always wondered what Setton saw in the Twilight saga, so...

Looking down, Setton noticed that Twilight had saw him falling as well, and had thrown herself face-up right underneath where he would have landed if Bass hadn’t caught him.

“Dot dot dot,” Setton said, but didn’t say, as if he was filling a speech bubble in some improbable comic-book adaptation of this scene.

“Dot dot dot,” Twilight responded in kind.

“Dot dot dot,” Setton responded in kind to her response in kind. He then leaned down to help Twilight to her hooves, as the “dot dot dot” joke would not further this story along in any constructive way if it went on for much longer. Twilight lunged upwards, hoping to steal a kiss, but accidentally made Setton panic and grab her sides instead of her hoof when he tried to pull her up. This then led to a comical display in which the mare was flipped over Setton’s head, the boy lost his balance, and they both fell over backwards.

As a result, Setton learned firsthand how a pony belly felt lying on a human face. Before Twilight could capitalize on this vulnerable moment, Bass calmly picked her up and placed her back on the ground in a standing position. Then he hauled Setton back up and began dusting them both off.

Setton, for one, wondered how Bass did this without arms. He didn’t ask this directly, partly due to the fact that he probably wouldn’t have understood Bass even if he did work up the courage to do so. “Y’ know, for what Lee claims to be a baby Legstep, you’re acting really…” Setton searched for the right words, drawing a blank. “Unbabylike,” he finished lamely.

Bass let out a few innocent sounding wubs as the arms decided to vanish into smoke. The Legstep then paused, turned on its heel towards one of the shelves, walked towards a seemingly random spot, and started letting out a few urgent sounding beats.

Setton briefly exchanged a glance with Twilight before walking over to the Legstep. “What is it, Bass?” he asked.

Just when Twilight walked over to the two, Legstep pulled its right leg back and violently kicked the shelf.

Suddenly, a Door appeared.

Then Bass opened it and went inside.

Both Twilight and Setton wondered how the hell that could have happened when the doorknob didn’t even move, but stopped worrying about that little detail the second they followed Bass in.

They found themselves at a loss for words. Try to picture a soap bubble with the light shining on its surface, with the random swirls of colors ever shifting and changing. Now scrap that, because this looked nothing like it.

It was simply a realm of pure chaos. While it was seemingly devoid of life, it did have a bookcase with numerous tomes stacked on the shelves. Bass was going through some records that had been shelved along with the books, and pulled out one with a strange Scratch gouged into it. It deposited the vinyl…somewhere…while Setton racked his brain as to how any of that was supposed to work.

Taking a look at the books on the shelves, he noticed there was a bit of paper that stuck out from between two hardbound titles, which Setton gingerly removed. It was a letter, but Setton's eyes went to the size of dinner plates when he saw whom it was addressed to. Reading silently to himself, it dawned on him what story they had tumbled into.

Replacing the tear-stained letter with care, he turned to tell Twilight to get back to the Door. However, she pieced together who lived here, standing stock still in the middle of the loosely defined study.

"This has to be the hoofwork of Discord," she said quietly staring at a mundane, cross-stitched lampshade reading ‘Chaos, Sweet, Chaos.’ "Only…where is he? What has he done to Equestria? Why haven't the Element Bearers from this world stopped him?" she continued, her questions coming in a melting pot of confusion, fear, and something harder to pin down.

Setton knew the answers to all three: Free from his stone prison by this point. Absolutely nothing, to the endless surprise of the Princesses. They can’t because they’re all dead of old age, which is why he was freed in the first place.

He knew from reading Sunny Meadow's final letter that this was they were past the epilogue to Keepers of Discord. He remembered how bittersweet that story had been, kind of like Toy Story 3, but while it would be interesting to chat about that with Twilight, he knew they should leave before Discord returned to his pocket dimension. Lord knows what he would make of Twilight Sparkle, alive and well in his living room. Or study. Or…whatever the hell this ‘room’ was. The point was Setton didn’t want to find out what that reaction would be.

So he said, “No idea, but we should probably leave.” He then strode to the Door, his footfalls making strange noises like ‘BAM,’ ‘MY LEG,’ and cats yowling to the soundtrack of Cats the Musical.

Twilight looked around for a moment, and after seeing no other way out of the realm (or for that matter, much else at all) realized she had little else to do but join him.

But the Legstep wasn't done yet.

It threw itself onto the bookcase several times with sudden vigor, finally dislodging a weathered tome from the shelves where it had been practically cemented in place, then launched the aforementioned tome towards Setton. In a rare feat of skill, he caught the flying book one handedly.

He blankly looked at the book before processing what had just happened. He looked over to the Legstep, which now was pushing him and Twilight through the Door.

While Twilight just went back through with a raised brow, Setton tried to push past Bass, hoping to return the book to the shelf. Instead, this only made the Legstep push harder, forcing Setton out of the realm with ease. The Door then shut behind Bass, only to disappear without a trace.

Setton simply stared at the empty space the Door once stood, at Bass, at the empty space once more, and finally back at Bass. The Legstep shook its head – er, torso? – and stalked up to Setton. Bass then lifted a leg, tapped the book in Setton’s hands, and after several seconds of this finally drew his attention to something sticking out of the pages. Curiously, Setton opened the book to discover a strangely familiar letter resting above the left page and an oddly foreboding chapter entitled ‘Committing Cosmic Regicide for Amateurs’ on the right.
Setton was looking more carefully at the writing on the letter and the paper it was written on when breath caught in his throat: it was the same kind as the other two papers from earlier, the ones that mysterious ‘Red Bard’ had left behind.

Setton Stone, I know what you’re thinking right now, but don’t worry about returning this book to Discord. This was never his to begin with.
The main thing you need to know is that it is vitally important that Lee gets this book, and that he holds onto it no matter what once he has it. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more than that, but I’m running out of time as it is.

I can only add this: When you get the urge, don’t be afraid to sing. Just be afraid when it becomes a duet.

Signed,

The Red Bard

P.S. Beware the Broken Scales with the cracked Crook and Flail. I know that’s a really cryptic phrase, but that’ll make sense in time. Trust me on that.

Setton flipped through the ancient tome only to find he couldn't understand a majority of what was written in it. Half of the pages were written in some kind of scripts he had never seen before, and the other half had its letters shifting around as if the ink composing them was alive. One of the few pages he could comprehend was the page underneath the letter.

What he saw on the page was a picture of an army of light staring down a legion of living shadows. Standing in the middle of what he assumed to be a battlefield was a cockroach with a white robe and a bearded man’s face. That in particular reminded Setton of Jesus, if Jesus was part cockroach, but he wasn’t sure what this ‘Cockroach Jesus’ would be doing with a keyboard in his insect hand. It seemed weirdly familiar, though, like he ought to know what it represented.

He wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the eyes in the picture seemed to be looking right at him.

After a moment of consideration, he was prepared to dismiss it as being just a weird artifact collected by the god of chaos. But…something set him off about the Bard’s message. It seemed odd to ask him to give Lee this particular book when it was virtually unreadable…except for that chapter on ‘Cosmic Regicide.’ That one was unnervingly clear on the weaknesses of a specific race of beings, but Setton wasn’t going to read that now. That picture on the opposite page would give him chills on its own.

Twilight was starting to get that look in her eyes again, the one Setton was certain would haunt him for days to come. The tension grew as they walked along the shelves, with Setton's discomfort paralleling Twilight's lust. A particular Door, however, abruptly changed this situation. When they went inside that one, they found themselves in a surprisingly mundane library.

Looks like the one in my high school, Setton mused silently. He was about to start reminiscing when something caught his eye, something behind him. Turning abruptly, he saw something that (cliché as it sounds) made his heart skip a beat.

The unicorn librarian had vanished from his sight, but there was a beautiful teenage girl behind him roughly his height, and looked only seventeen by his reckoning. She was wearing a periwinkle polo, a dark violet skirt that came halfway down her thighs, as well as a peculiar look on her face. Good God, this girl's adorable, Setton thought dazedly. I should probably talk to her.

"…uh..." he articulated.

Brilliant job, Shakespeare.

The girl continued to look at him oddly before she started to walk towards him, but to their mutual surprise she ended up tripping on the carpet.

Setton managed to catch her and they froze for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. He was entranced, but something in his mind raised a few red flags.

His gaze was drawn to the ground behind the girl's head, and noticed a school's logo was emblazoned upon it. Well, it confirmed his theory of a high school library, but he knew that it was familiar. Looking around, he found it odd how deserted it looked, almost like a set without any actors.

He glanced up at the clock ticking away on the wall. Most students would probably be in classes at the time it read, Setton realized, so they were probably alone. Nevertheless, that didn’t’ explain where Twilight went off –

He nearly went into cardiac arrest when he realized the logo said "Canterlot High" in large lettering.

Oh.

Thus, he realized what happened to the unicorn.

Twilight looked at him from his arms, but his anxiety shrank to what one generally feels in the contact of the other sex. He realized that he didn’t care about this revelation so much – to the contrary, he was actually starting to lose himself in the possibilities this presented to him. Setton leaned in, the girl in his arms drawing closer expectantly…

…until at the last second he transitioned into a deep hug. Surprised - and quite disappointed - Twilight returned the gesture.

"...Setton?"

"Yes?"

"Can you be honest with me?”

“Sure.”

“…do guys just…not want to be with me?”

Startled, Setton drew back. "What?"

"Every guy I've seen in the past few days keeps turning me away – even though it’s only been three, that’s still a lot considering nopony in Equestria’s seen a stallion in the last fifteen years,” she said, haltingly. “...I hoped that it was all just playing hard to get, but…now I’m not so sure."

After a moment of silence, Twilight looked at him with tears forming in her eyes. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Setton grasped for words. He then paused. “Before I answer that, why did you say you’ve only seen three guys recently?”

Twilight blinked. “Well, yes. I’ve only seen you, Lee, and Alfonz.”

Setton frowned. “What about Silias, or…The Beast?” he added after a beat, barely suppressing a shudder.

Twilight looked at him in confusion. “What about them?”

“Aren’t they guys too?” Setton asked.

“They are?” Twilight said. “That’s strange. I couldn’t tell that by their scents…”

Setton could probably guess why The Beast’s scent would confuse her, considering he was an eldritch abomination with a decidedly hipster sense of style, but Silias? Why wouldn’t she recognize Silias as a guy?

“As much as that’s going to an interesting line of investigation…” Twilight said, shaking her head slowly. “…the fact remains that every guy I’ve known about keeps turning me away. All of my friends were able to find stallions, and while they…aren’t around anymore, they still knew what it was like. Their beds were never cold until everypony else’s were. But me? No matter how I’ve asked, or signaled, or anything, I’ve never even been able to…”

She shuddered, burying her head into Setton’s embrace. “…doesn’t…doesn’t anypony get it? I just want to be loved,” she whimpered, slowly soaking his shoulder. “I just want to be loved.”

Except for the muffled sniffles, the library was silent.

“Twilight?” Setton said after a few minutes of just holding her.

“…yeah?”

The boy gently lifted Twilight’s head so she was looking at him…

…and he kissed her.

---

Twilight clung tightly to Setton, almost viselike in her embrace. This made it a little difficult when Setton tried to get them back to the Peisistratos, since the girl refused to let him go. Eventually, they left the library of Canterlot High, but with Twilight still holding onto him when she transformed back into a mare Setton buckled under her weight like Hillary Clinton before corporate money.

They quickly reached a consensus that she’d let go of him on the condition that he’d stay in her line of sight. There were no objections from Bass, who had gone off somewhere while they were in Canterlot High’s library. After twenty minutes without finding another Door, there was an awkward silence that descended upon the trio.

Bass finally decided to break the silence, which was a miracle in itself in how he allowed it to go on for so long, by playing a familiar beat. Recognizing it after a few seconds of listening, Setton inexplicably found himself singing the lyrics.

“Now a rainbow's tale isn't quite as nice
As the story we knew of sugar and spice
But a rainbow's easy once you get to know it
With the help of the magic of a Pegasus Device.”

Twilight looked at Setton strangely, as the latter found he was swaying to the beat. She began feeling a bit of magic in the air, a peculiar strain that made her pause and start scanning the area.

“Let's delve deeper into rainbow philosophy
Far beyond that of Cloudsdale's mythology
It's easy to misjudge that floating city
With it's alluring decor and social psychology
But with all great things comes a great responsibility
That of Cloudsdale's being weather stability
How, you ask, are they up to the task?
To which the answer is in a simple facility.”

Setton’s voice resonated through the air as he sang with more and more volume, losing himself in the song. Twilight, for her part, noticed there was something off about the voice she was hearing. Not Setton’s, but…more feminine. Why was she hearing two voices? Was it Bass who was doing that?

Wait a minute…she KNEW that voice.

“In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true
In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through
In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true.”

Setton danced in a smooth yet somehow jerky form through the instrumental, like a marionette along its strings. There was something terrifying to that dance, a sense of madness to that music even as it began grinding to a halt. Ready for the final verse, his voice permeated the space around them with an odd power behind it.

“In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true
In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through
In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true
In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through.”

The music stopped entirely, and Setton was about to ask Bass where he learned that song when the Red Bard’s words came back to him.

I can only add this: When you get the urge, don’t be afraid to sing. Just be afraid when it becomes a duet.

The penny dropped. He hadn’t imagined that other voice, had he?

Setton noticed that their surroundings had changed in the time had lost himself in the song. He looked around the metallic corridor and saw a pipe running along the ceiling labeled with a word, a single word that brought chills to Setton’s spine.

“SPECTRA”

Oh shit.

Setton started looking around in a terrible sense of panic, thinking he was alone in this madhouse. He relaxed when he saw that, relatively speaking, Twilight and Bass hadn’t moved. He was comforted immensely by the fact of their presence, but t the same time was absolutely horrified that they had been dragged there too.

Don’t panic, he thought desperately. Just stay calm, and try to figure out what happened. You were walking along, there were no Doors in sight, and Bass suddenly broke into a rendition of Rainbow Factory. You sing along, do a little dance, and friggity bobbity boo, you end up in the actual factory. Unless I’m missing something, one of those actions led here.

A strange feeling came over Setton’s back, but it wasn’t apprehension. It was actually the scuttling of a small ivory arachnid, on its way up his spine to poke from his jacket’s collar. It looked at its surroundings disinterestedly, and proceeded to fall asleep on Setton’s shoulder.

…how long has Biblio been in my jacket? he wondered dazedly. And why does my back feel strange? He paused, regarding the bone spider and his change in location. It seemed strange, but was there a connection between his presence and their arrival?

Screaming interrupted his train of thought.

“What was that?”

He had a sneaking suspicion what it was, but wanted to make absolutely sure. He tore down the hall towards the source and saw a large double door. Slowing down, he quietly inched it open. It opened up into a large room with a strange device that drew his attention. He was just in time to witness the screamer, a small pegasus – or what was left of one – dropping into its aperture. He watched in horror as it ate him alive, leaving its hoof sticking out in a feeble attempt to be free as it was swallowed.

Setton barely registered Twilight poking her head into the opening below him as he stood in shocked silence. He did make note of a Door above the small crowd slamming shut, but no one else paid it any mind, favoring to watch the grisly machine producing Spectra by the filly-load. His vision turned red as he watched one pegasus laugh her ass off at the sight. He briefly wondered whether it was the reactions of the fillies on the gangplank or the actual act of feeding the filly to the machine that did it.

Twilight, though she dared not speak for several reasons, thought that laugh was really familiar.

He saw an orange filly collapse in shock, and a yellow/green filly trying to get her to her hooves. Suited pegasi moved in with wicked looking devices, advancing on the terrified fillies slowly and deliberately. Setton’s horror was replaced with rage, and he reached into his backpack. His fingers grasped for two things, which he had just decided to put to very good use. A wrench appeared as he drew his hand out, as well as a cloak that Twilight recognized from earlier. The former he had swiped from Lee’s toolbox before they left his apartment – you never know what you might need a wrench for – and the latter was about to come in very handy.

“Don’t follow me,” he managed to say, before drawing the cloak over him and disappeared. A half second later, the door inched out ever so lightly as the furious man made his way into the room.

Twilight, standing stock still in shock, simply watched as the pegasus foals suddenly took to the air, diving straight towards their aggressors. In the confusion, one could miss several pegasi being knocked down by a blur of metal from empty air. Two fillies went up to the scaffolding above, and went to work on a sealed door nearby. A cry of utter fury rang out, but Twilight was startled to realize that it was a female voice from the other end of the room. Her eyes looked over to see violet eyes projecting her unbridled rage from under a familiar, multicolored mane. Merciful Celestia, she recognized that mare.

What in the unholy realm of Tartarus is Rainbow Dash doing here?

However, she was not given proper time to process this, as the other fillies landed on the scaffolding, in an attempt to keep their assailants at bay while another two fillies worked frantically on the door. She felt there was something familiar about the orange pegasus, like remembering a far-off dream, but she couldn’t recall the name.

She was about to charge in herself when Bass pushed past. Oddly enough, it seemed to have been waiting for something. It didn’t flinch when a furious suited pegasus saw it and lunged with its taser, but Twilight watched in horror as the Legstep abruptly caught fire.

The suited pegasus finally seemed to register that this wasn’t an escaping foal when he lifted his goggles, staring dumbstruck at the flaming thing in front of him. He was promptly knocked back by a fireball to the chest, since pyromancy was yet another thing Bass could do for some reason. The pegasus tumbled to the floor like a ragdoll, still alive thanks to the protection of his uniform.

Twilight stared at Bass, who was nodding at her with a tranquil air completely out of synch with the fact that he was still on FIRE. Bass then charged deeper into the room, tossing fireballs from his speakers and unleashing merry hell on the pegasi inside.

She thought of charging in once more, spells blazing and all, but after considering the number of pegasi she realized that would be a horrible plan. This may have had something to do with how she just witnessed one take a fireball the size of a hoofball at point-blank range (to the head, no less) and only black out from the impact.

She considered bluffing her way into stopping this madness – she WAS Celestia’s personal student after all, and she could easily claim she’d tell the Princess all about what she had seen. The issue with that plan, sadly, was that she had absolutely no idea what kind of state Equestria had to be in to let this injustice stand. A part of her was terrified to find out, actually.

Hearing a loud bang, her head snapped to look at the scene on the scaffolding, watching in shock as the invisibility cloak was knocked from Setton’s frame, exposing him to the angry pegasi. He charged them in an attempt to protect the fillies, but without the cloak he was just a man with a wrench. Rainbow Dash took him down personally, launching him directly into the Spectra machine. He punched through the piping at its bottom as if it was made of tissue paper.

She turned her attention to the cornered foals in paralyzed horror as Rainbow began reducing children to mere stains on her coat, plowing through them in a display of unfettered bloodlust.

---

Inside the piping of the machine, Setton was drifting in what he now knew was the liquid remains of countless pegasi. Pain radiated from a number of excruciating injuries as he struggled to hold his breath. Flail chest, failing lungs, a broken arm, and an outright shredded back, his nerve clusters informed him, keeping him painfully updated at his body’s grim condition.

A motion in the colorful fluid drew his eye. He registered Biblio easily in the Spectra, as he was the closest thing to white that he could see. It seemed to be looking over his body with interest, and it skittered over to him. He wondered how the bone spider could pull this off in the magical fluid, but this quickly gave way to figuring out what the eldritch arachnid was doing. It seemed to be darting around him at impossible speeds, leaving a trail of brilliant colors that made the Spectra look monochrome in comparison.

He briefly tried to panic when he realized his limbs were drawing tighter and tighter to him as Biblio worked. He’s wrapping me in some kind of cocoon, he realized. As it encompassed his hapless figure, he also realized that he was now able to breathe. The eldritch webbings briefly parted to allow Biblio access. Flitting about his protected form, it went to work on his body properly. The spider dove into the gash his ribs had made, and stirred around inside of him, repairing his battered organs and stitching bones and muscles back into place.

Setton could feel every second of it, and it hurt. Something stopped him from crying out (the process felt almost like a night terror, upon reflection), and when he looked down, he saw Biblio emerging from the wound and stitching it up neatly as the bone spider exited.

The pain went away immediately as a new feeling flowed through him. Finished with its task, Biblio opened the cocoon, weaving a ladder back from the hole to the scaffolding outside before settling into Setton’s coat once more.

Setton came from the cocoon feeling incredibly well-rested, light, and much more whole than he had entered. He failed to notice the level of Spectra draining drastically as he exited the machine.

Climbing the webbing with unnatural speed, he leaped over the railing to land squarely on the scaffold. Several pegasi looked at the human in shock, trying to process what they were seeing. To them, a monster formed of Spectra was approaching them, vengeance in its eyes as it stalked forwards, dripping kaleidoscopic fluid wherever it walked. The smart ones got the hell out of there immediately.

Bass, meanwhile, had stood stock still during this entire tableau, caring even less about the fire as its attention was solely on the man above. It began to play some kind of oddly fitting music, speakers turned directly towards Setton as the flames on the Legstep grew higher and higher. Some of the pegasi guards tried to stop Bass from setting anything else on fire, but if anything that seemed to make Bass throw more and more fireballs.

They did notice, oddly enough, that the fireballs were being launched in rhythm with the song even as Bass targeted the pegasi fighting him.

On the monstrous form above, the fluid began to writhe, solidify, and take shape, flowing into scything growths that kept erupting from the liquid skin. The Spectra encapsulating Setton stalked forwards, long-dead faces reflecting ominously in the blades it spawned. Seeing this coupled with the inferno impossibly leaping up the metal walls around them, the guards who hadn’t deserted by now were deserting, flipping the fuck out, doing both of the above, or standing their ground in an impressive display of bravery.

In turn, their cries had rang out somewhere along the lines of: “Help!” “What the fuck is that thing?!” “Demon! We’re all gonna die!” and “Get all security personnel to the Spectra harvester, NOW!”

Some of the ones brave enough to face this horror were casually swiped them from the air, leaving the lucky ones dazed as they crashed into the scaffolding. The unlucky ones were sent to the floor below, a sickening crunch announcing several bones breaking on the impact.

The thing launched itself upwards into a shaft in the ceiling and began clawing up the inner wall to emerge in a corridor; one that looked much like the one Setton had arrived into. Speaking of the boy, he regained enough awareness of what he was doing in time to see Scootaloo barreling down the corridor towards him.

“This way!”

The filly’s eyes widened when she noticed the human poking his head out of the shaft. The Spectra had receded from his face by this point, having sloughed down his form as Setton’s thoughts fell out of synch.

Behind her, Rainbow Dash kept obliterating everything between her and her intended target.

Without slowing down, the filly took a leap of faith and shot into the shaft. Setton pressed himself to the side of the shaft to let her pass, the scything Spectra having anchored him to the wall like a spider. Unfortunately, they had torn through the shaft, their impossible sharpness slowly lowering him down as the metal tore.

Setton paused, and took the time to count the appendages. There were exactly eight of them on his back. The hell? What did Biblio do to him in that machine, turn him into Man-Spider?

Back up in the corridor, Rainbow Dash had got to the vent and began gazing down the shaft with enraged, bloodshot eyes. Suddenly, the anger in her face vanished, only to be replaced by a cruel smirk. She started laughing like the madmare she had become, her chilling cackle echoing down the vent.

“You never did have a good sense of direction, Scootaloo!” she crowed. Then Rainbow stopped laughing as she recognized Setton’s descending form. “How are you still alive?!” she screeched.

The man tore his gaze downwards to glance back at the hole in the machine, and then back to her. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said in full honesty. “I’m probably going to be asking myself that for a long time, actually.”

Setton abruptly ran out of ruined shaft, tumbling and flailing through the empty air. As he fell, he saw the Door enter his field of vision, giving him a crazy idea. He reached out for the handle with his hands, not daring to see what would happen if he tried the scything ‘legs’ on his back, and did his best to brace for the inevitable jolt.

The impact nearly tore his arm from its socket, but the Door opened to show the Peisistratos on the other side.

Scootaloo looked at the Door with wide eyes, wondering where in Tartarus it had came from. “Where in Tartarus did that come from? Where does that even lead?”

Setton grunted in effort to keep hold of the physics-defying, old oak Door. “Out,” he managed. “Outoutoutoutoutoutoutoutoutoutoutoutout.”
The filly realized the triple meaning of Setton’s frantic straining, and flew through the Door as if the devil was at her tail. Considering that Rainbow was headed down the shaft and the number of guards in the room had skyrocketed, it was a reasonable reaction.

Setton looked around him before letting go from the Door, dropping down to the catwalk below. His arm really didn’t give him much of a choice in the matter, nor did the dive-bombing form of a really pissed off Rainbow Dash about to plow into him.

Bass responded to the situation by cranking up the volume on that oddly appropriate song he had been playing. Setton felt himself being compelled to move as the Spectra surged around him, but this time it massed around his head in the vague form of an open-faced helm. Allowing his body to follow the music, Setton found the Spectral appendages lance out at the nearest pegasus. Blood flew as it ripped through the unfortunate pegasus’s shoulder, sending it to the ground in a dizzying tailspin.

His cohorts shifted their expressions from violent and stony to piss-less terror as the massive spider danced through air, Spectra, and blood. Rainbow Dash had actually paused at the sight, processing what she was seeing while her guards cried out in agony. She didn’t pause for long, though…

Setton landed nimbly on the catwalk, noting the wide berth the guards were giving him now. He thought about how he was going to get himself, Twilight, and Bass to the Door when he was tackled from the side. Using their momentum, Setton managed to launch the furious form of Rainbow Dash further down the catwalk. The mare wordlessly screamed a challenge to Setton, the former of which was still in a blood rage but a bit more wary than before. The music surged once more from Bass’ speakers as Spectra from the Harvester’s bowels was drawn up and over to Setton. After for a brief second the Spectra reformed itself around the boy’s form, entirely covering Setton’s face again before it decided to grow a maw of its own and scream.

The other pegasi – the reinforcements who had had the sense to hang back – shot down the nearest open corridors in an understandably undignified manner. They didn’t have the compulsion to sacrifice their lives for the sake of innocent foals, so they sure as hell weren’t giving them up to whatever the fuck this horror was.

“Stupid, fucking, cowards!” Rainbow Dash yelled after them.

This did absolutely nothing to change their minds on the matter, leaving her, Setton, Bass, the wounded, the dead, a few crackling flames and several seconds of pregnant silence alone in the room.

Dash turned to Setton, silently weighing the option of trying to kill him over going after Scootaloo. After a moment of reassessing the situation, she retained enough sanity to decide upon the latter path, flying off into the open Door. She had no time to indulge this bullshit while her true prey got away.

Setton, while he had been filled with such fury moments ago, suddenly felt it dripping away from him to leave his head bare once more. The Spectral armor he was ensconced in began to marble in pure yellow and verdant green, pulsing balefully as he knelt down to cradle a lifeless filly in his arms. At least, he cradled the most intact corpse he could find. More than a few pegasi foals had been scattered across the catwalk and the floor below, a mass of blood and bone that was more heartbreaking than horrifying to look at. These had been someone’s babies, and they had left that mortal coil with barely enough intact remains to scoop into a bucket, let alone a casket.

Even with an intact body, Setton realized, finding enough records of these children to deliver them back to their families would be a nightmare. Horridly timed pun aside, Setton took a moment to wallow in this emotional tide, mourning for those slaughtered in this place and even for those he had just struck down himself. He was so wrapped up in this state of grief that he failed to note the irony of the Spectra dripping off of him.

After what felt like hours, he found himself drawing away from the dead filly’s form, laying her down gently as he looked around him. He went over to each of the guards he had fought, and found to his surprise – and horror – that not one of them was dead. Was it a relief to see that he hadn’t murdered them in what was essentially a berserker state? Sure. Were their agonized states any comfort to him? Hell no.

Outside of the rush of…whatever just happened, because Setton didn’t really understand much of what transpired, he finally became aware of a strange feeling in his chest. It was not quite painful, but some vague instinct told him it should be excruciatingly so. He looked down as the Spectra parted from the center of his ribcage, and he nearly fainted from the sight.

Biblio’s legs were sunk halfway into his flesh, spaced evenly between his ribs, and were moving in place with complex but ultimately minute movements. Setton, on a whim, looked behind him. He paid close attention to Biblio as he saw the fluid, scything appendage move in tandem with the bone spider’s leg.

The boy blinked, and his heart began to race alongside his thoughts as the implications revealed themselves to him.

As if noticing his discomfort with the realization that an eldritch spider was knee-deep in his chest, effectively using the connection to puppeteer him into a flat out rampage in the Harvesting Chamber, Biblio calmly removed his legs from inside Setton. The Spectra vanished immediately, flowing back into the boy’s body like water through a sieve.

This draining had incorporated several meanings of the word, and Setton’s body abruptly went from feeling graceful and light to feeling as though they were made of lead. Looking towards the door below him, he used his waning strength to call out drunkenly to the unicorn he had dragged into this mess. “A liddle help’d be ‘preciated, Twily, if ye’d kind-le come’mon up here…thank ye…”

And with that, he slumped over, unconscious.

Comments

[Novi]

This reminds me of Bioshock.. I love it!

[DeepThought]

Is this a crossover to ink heart?

[LeoneHaxor]

4357655 Yes, it is. I had thought to myself, "What would happen if, instead of books, a Silvertongue had read a fanfiction?", and from that question came The Curse of a Well-Read Man. While the actual characters from Inkheart aren't going to make an appearance, it originates in the same part of the multiverse.