Prologues

by Broken Phalanx

Chapter 3: The not-so-Great Escape

“Ah, ah, ah,” said a voice to Selim in the moment that took place between regaining consciousness and opening his eyes. “You did quite well to not lose an eye there. Or your life, but that’s less important.”

Selim wrenched his eyes open, the caked blood and agony in his skull making even this simple action herculean in difficulty. Everything hurt more than it should have; he must have been beaten long after the point of unconsciousness as several of his ribs felt cracked or bruised, and his left forearm had a bone poking under the skin in an unnatural and quite painful location.

“Ol’ Coúp,” Selim said, his misery catching up to him faster than his suspicion. “Why’re you here?”

“Oh, well, you know how it goes,” said Ol’ Coúp, before tapping quite cheerfully with a bird-like talon on the stone bars separating the both of them from each other; in this moment of contact, the bars shone brilliantly for a moment, before dimming into an entirely different substance: iron, if Selim’s fuzzy mind was to be believed. “I felt compelled to do something, when I realized you were going to go for the,” he stuck his tongue out in disgust, “boring option.”

“No,” Selim said quietly, unused to this degree of mugginess in his thoughts.

“Oh, don’t say it wasn’t the boring option! If everyone solved everything with words, well, there’d be nothing for me to watch!” Ol’ Coúp said, in a mockingly petulant voice. “Though, since you did try it…” and with that, Ol’ Coúp disappeared liquid-like slushing noise only to reappear on Selim’s skin as a moving tattoo, “…I will say this; you goofed.” And with that, Selim’s skin rippled like a stage canvas and again Ol’ Coúp was elsewhere, this time sticking his head through the gates to the outside. “I hadn’t taken you to be another bleeding heart-“

“I’m not, no thanks to you. What right-”

“-but you think everything is ‘poor put upon you’ and like to whine. You’re completely neglecting the fact that some of us get bored easily. And right to rule? You speak as if there’s some sort of objective qualifier to all of that bunk; well, at least my throne wasn’t built upon corpses. Who are you again?” The monstrous amalgam paused for a moment, but before a reply could be substantiated, Ol’ Coúp simply chuckled and muttered, “Clearly no one particularly interesting. You’re just as boring as whoever is leading you lot right now, you know that? Though, to be fair, if you were in charge, you’d probably be trying to implement a different system, one with more checks and balances than a bank registry. You’d also be failing, more likely than not, because that’s your natural state of doing business, but trying nevertheless. Impulsive. You might turn out to be fun, with a bit of time and effort.”

Selim opened his mouth to retort, but found, quite inexplicably, it was filled with some form of custard.

“Goodness, aren’t you a gabby jaws?” Ol’ Coúp slid between the bars and poked Selim’s nose, grinning the entire time. “Perhaps you lot are a bit irksome, but at least your lot aren’t bothered about all the nonsense these equines tout. But, sadly, I can’t help you escape.” Ol’ Coúp winked conspiratorially at Selim before slapping the human across the face cheerfully. “Too troublesome and not entertaining enough. I’m more interested to see how you get out yourself. If you do, of course.”

And with that, Ol’ Coúp disappeared in a foul smelling cloud.

Selim took a few moments to pat himself down, making sure that everything was in its correct place and that he hadn’t somehow grown a third eye from his physical contact with Ol’ Coúp; some of Ol Coúp’s visitors considered it good fortune to only endure having all of their body hair turned into some sort of brittle toffee, or only growing a second nose on the top of their head.

As it turned out, Selim did note one minor alteration; evidently, the chaotic god had seen fit to give Selim fingernails made of, and here a vision-memory substantiated the word, 'chocolate'. Otherwise, however, Selim counted his blessings to not be the like the person who grew a second head or had a hand replaced with some sort of crab-like claw.

The moment Selim finished his self-examination, he glanced around his cell for a moment.

What he found was disquieting; heavy metal bars to his front (courtesy of Ol’ Coúp), stone walls to either side, and logs of wood behind him. He took a moment to contemplate how idiotic it would be to die of smoke inhalation, compared it to the idea of being tortured to death by a pony, realized how stupid it was to even try and liken the two, and with specter of agonizing suffering urging him on, turned to face the wooden wall.

Selim had always contemplated how strange it was that humanity had only produced one ‘Witch’ thus far, oftentimes concluding that perhaps more people possessed the same abilities as him but simply maintained their silence before any and all inspectors. It was in that rather dank jail-cell, however, that Selim was struck with a profound sense of possessiveness.

As he felt preternatural energies flow through him, the only thing he thought was, I’m the only one who can do this right now, and it feels great.

There was a sudden rush of ozone, an immense increase in pressure, a hint of a translucent disturbance in the air, and the wall was suddenly hit with a wave of flame.

Yet Selim was in no mood to enjoy his success; he was, instead, in the fetal position, as if trying to shield his hands from the entirety of the world: he had, with great skill no less, successfully charred most of the skin on his palms.

It was an interesting tableau for a few moments, the whimpering human on one side, an unnaturally large and roaring flame on the other; sadly, however, it had all the durability of a soap-bubble, as the instant Selim heard a pony voice shout from within the jail complex he was on his feet, fueled by a combination of fear and rage. He hoped, desperately and full well knowing it was impossible, that the fire would devour the wood faster than the equines could arrive at his cell.

Making a quick mental checklist, Selim realized (with no shortage of joy) that the only way to access him (and thus stop his escape) would be via the jail doors; making a snap judgment, he valiantly leapt to the bars in an attempt to stall whichever pony sent to investigate.

Unfortunately for all involved, that pony was Mercy, and she was holding onto a spear quite gamely.

What followed was a series of movements that would’ve put an Olympian’s reflexes to shame; a flurry of blows to the mid region, all of which were dodged by pure luck, followed by an angled strike that sliced one of Selim’s calves into a bloody mess, finally finished by a short lunge intended to puncture the human quickly and remorselessly, which, luckily for Selim, instead simply tore through his left forearm and was caught on his broken bone when she tried to retract the spearhead; ‘luck’, here, being a relative term of course, as it was exactly as agonizing as undergoing a surgical operation without anesthetic, perhaps somewhat more so.

Selim, adrenaline pumped to the point of twitching, grabbed onto the spear shaft, hauled it sideways until it was levered between two bars, and snapped it with a reptilian hissing noise emanating from his clenched teeth. Finally, in the midst of ignoring his higher level thinking, he gripped what remained of the spear shaft and ripped the weapon from his arm, only to drive it without hesitation in between the bars and into one of Mercy’s front legs.

Selim knew he would remember that noise until his dying day, though he was fully aware there was no real way to describe it. The closest description he could come up with could basically be summarized thusly: take a person, strap the poor fool to a chair or something, get a hammer and chisel, and simply start smashing off fingers with the tools that were, as the case may be, handy.

Organic sculpting, as it were.

They both toppled backwards away from each other, both gasping in some twisted mixture of surprise, pain, and horror.

“I…” Selim said, his words slurred from both his physical and mental agony, “I did not want to do that... why couldn’t you have just let me talk when we had the chance?!”

He tried to continue his diatribe while glaring at Mercy, but was stricken silent when he realized all that dull greyness from her coat and mane had simply melted away, leaving it a resplendent blue and green, respectively. She was still alive, though clearly fading, and appeared to be trying to say something (likely a curse mocking Selim’s very existence) but it was something Selim felt compelled to hear before it was too late. What’s the worst she could do anymore, after all?

Angrily trip on him?

Selim carefully tightened what clothing he could in attempt to staunch his bleeding, the fingers of his left hand entirely unresponsive as he performed this laborious process, and with a few moments of deliberation carefully crouch/limped towards the stricken pony.

It did not look good.

The spear had neatly carved through the joint of her knee, and Mercy’s collapse had only served to tear tendon, muscle, and nerve, the levering action of the spear shaft taking the pony’s leg apart in a remarkably horrifying yet neat fashion; the only thing keeping the foreleg attached to the cannon were a couple of flaps of skin.

“I’m sor-sorry,” Mercy said, gasping out the words between her clenched teeth.

Selim, doing some quick mental arithmetic, estimated he had roughly three more minutes before the wall would finish burning to the extant where he could simply escape. He glanced down at the stricken pony, and several unsavory thoughts raced to be first implemented, guising themselves as reasonable enough considerations; if he took her head back to camp, he’d likely be renowned for his escape, or if he rather messily spread her organs about the room it’d shatter the morale of the ponies within the fort, or if he…

The list went on and on, to the extent that he was feeling faint at some of the suggestions his own subconscious was making. He grabbed the stave-like half of the spear not buried in the pony’s leg, and leaned on it like a walking stick to keep himself upright.

“Sorrysorrysorrysorry-”

And the damned horse wouldn’t shut up long enough to let him think in peace.

He had come there to avoid bloodshed, maybe just discuss getting the food back without much of a conflict. But no, that would’ve been the simple thing, wouldn’t it have? So now, here he was, standing over a previously murderous mare that had been a whole hell of lot less pastel just a few minutes ago, with a hand that likely wouldn’t function ever again thanks to her, desperately trying to drive himself into recreating the grisly actions that were taking place in his mind upon the canvas of reality; He wanted to put her head on a spike and parade it around as a personal trophy, partially as revenge but also because it might, might just get him some much deserved respect…

Might get him some respect…

Selim nearly choked on his own tongue when he consciously realized that he was contemplating savage murder simply for a cursory bit of acknowledgement.

That . . . seems like something I’ll have to keep an eye on, if I get out of here alive, he thought to himself, before glancing at the dying pony.

. . . Though, why couldn’t I have had this little moral revelation after I was already fucking gone?

Selim relaxed the death grip he had on his stave and quickly brought the midriff of his shirt up to his teeth. As his bit into the cloth and tore it from his body, he calculated both his and the pony’s odds of survival; considering the likelihood of eventual infection and sepsis, he estimated that each of them, he and the pony, had roughly fifteen and five percent odds, respectively.

Gangrene is a bitch to deal with, Selim thought, offhandedly, trying to distract himself from the pain.

Selim, biting his stave to keep a grasp on it, wrapped the cloth around Mercy’s leg, about four inches above the actual injury to prevent the cloth from slipping off from the blood. Having only five functioning fingers made the job take three times longer than it should have, and it was with incredible reluctance that Selim knelt down to apply the final touches; there was a tricky moment where he had to simultaneously spit out the stave, keep the cloth from unraveling by pinching it with his pinky and ring finger, and catch the stave with the three fingers of his right hand not occupied with holding this entire satire of a surgery together.

“Sorr-”

“Shush,” Selim said offhandedly, placing a rudimentary knot above the placed stave; all that would remain would be to tighten his jury-rigged tourniquet. “I’ll be honest here; this is going to suck worse than anything else in your life. But, uh, think of it like this, if it makes you feel better; I’m giving you your life, in exchange for, uh . . .” And, without any warning, he quickly rotated the stave, wincing slightly as the charred portion of his hand finally cracked and bled.

Selim was, lamentably, correct in his assumption. Surprise and haste got him about five full rotations into tightening the cloth when, finally, the shocked pony began spastically jerking her limbs and screaming; there was a blur of hooves, an agonized human feebly clutching new bruises, and a sharp intake of breath, though from pain or apologetic instinct it was unknown.

“Fuck it,” Selim said, before carefully placing the chunk of wood into Mercy’s mouth like a bit and forcing her jaws to close around it; there was a moment where he nearly worried about the lumber splintering, but after the initial creaking his fears remained only in the realm of speculation. “Keep that steady if you want to keep your insides, uh, inside. And, uh, keep looking at the roof…”

All she felt was a slight tugging sensation, almost painless in comparison to what she had just experienced, and Mercy saw, barely over the edge of her vision, the man stagger away into the smoke and fire, carrying something that looked strangely blue.

And then she shuddered when she remembered his words: ‘Something about an exchange, Mercy thought, desperately averting her eyes from her limbs, hoping that he had simply been trying to intimidate her.

Yes, a part of her mind rationalized, the damage had likely been bad enough to warrant an amputation. The irrational part, however, the part that was fully in the reigns of her physical responses, was instead reduced to screaming incoherently around the bit and sobbing in pain.

It was in this state that the rest of the fort’s ponies, the Draconequus’ magic thankfully spent, found Mercy, about ninety seconds later. It would be said, for the several days it took before she recovered enough to be counseled, that it was good fortune for her to have all the supplies needed to make a tourniquet for herself, and the common-sense and dexterity to use them all.

***

Selim staggered away from the smoking fortification, carrying a rather grotesque club and possessed by the quietly desperate and incoherent thoughts of a man who has inhaled far more smoke than is healthy for him; Mercy’s sudden alteration from homicidal (Xenocidal? He could never quite remember how to define it if he was the target) maniac to remorseful tripedal equine had been stranger than any other emotional shift he had seen in his entire life. True, he had seen the various masks some human murderers had worn and discarded during some of the trials he had attended as a Royal Executioner, and while he hadn’t quite attained mastery of piercing the various lies people could concoct, Selim thought himself at least a tolerable lie detector, even if he was occasionally off on some of the details.

Why the hell did I bother taking the leg with me?

The only problem was, the murderous glee and heartfelt apology had appeared equally honest in the face of Selim’s amateur analysis.

“Now, why was that?”

A good question, but I think the bit about the leg also needs to be answer-OOF!

And then he stumbled into a pile of meteorologically inappropriate snow. For one, it was warmer than the surrounding air, and it was the dead of summer.

“Ah, of course there has to be magic. Wouldn’t have made sense if there wasn’t.”

And if anyone or anypony had passed by, that would’ve been the extent of Selim’s elucidation, a simple attempt to explain abnormal weather behavior. However, these words stuck in Selim’s head far longer than most of his grumblings, and gears and cogs turned as his brain stumbled its way to a far more important answer.

Magic. Adjustment in behavior. Alteration of coat tint, potentially a side effect.

But the amount of power to do something like that would be phenomenal, far greater than any pony sorcerer Selim could think of, akin to making rocks weep or, or…

“Changing reality,” Selim said, under his breath. Ever since that mish-mashed creature, Ol Coup, had suggested his namesake, Selim had distrusted Ol Coup’s allegiance as an uninvolved party; this particular revelation, however, went far beyond Selim’s capacity to consider Ol Coup with disgust, even beyond marking the amalgam a simple target of malice, and well into Selim’s definition of ‘incorrigible bastard’.

“You called?” Ol Coup said, rising out of the snow at a geometrically impossible direction with a bag of popcorn. “I must say, you’ve done quite well for yourself today, haven’t you? You’ve been beaten within an inch of your life, burned half a fort to the ground, narrowly avoided being skewered, played doctor…” The last phrase was accompanied by a suggestive waggle of the eyebrows that Selim would’ve normally found somewhat embarrassing, had he not taken the moment to fling a bolt of conjured lightning at Ol Coup.

What followed was Selim toppling over, rigid, as the electrical current left his body; there was a moment where he dared hope that he had struck his target, but Ol Coup, well out of Selim’s snow-filled sight but well within hearing, simply chuckled at this attempt.

“Oh, silly, silly ape, with your shenanigans I shall never grow bored. Again and again you manage to harm yourself with each and every magical attempt, and yet you never cease. By the way, nice job with the lightning; it added a good lemon twinge to my popcorn. But, truly, you’d improve magnificently if you could only stop thinking about magic like a pony. They blather incessantly about harmony, surely you understand, and if I’m to judge I think their magic relies on there being some sort of universal way things are supposed to function.”

Ol Coup, perturbed to have even admitted that much, stuck out his tongue defiantly. A moment passed before he realized Selim vision was filled with too much snow to see this, whereupon he continued his rant, his pace accelerating.

“It’s not how we do things, is it? And always, you try to reject a fact you know in your heart.”

Ol Coup dramatically stood up and proclaimed, “Selim, I am your father.”

There was a moment as Selim considered the possibility, and within that moment every functioning neuron in his brain, save one, confirmed the appropriate response to Ol Coup to be “bullshit” within record speed. The brain-cell that hadn’t asserted that to be the appropriate response, however, went rogue and took over his mouth to supplement a significantly more polite negation to the Chaotic god.

“That seems highly implausible,” came the muffled, snow-blocked response.

“Oh, not literally,” Ol Coup said, clearly disgusted that one of his comments should be understood in such a manner, “but from an ontologically level, you, and others like you, you hyper-evolved simian, are basically my brats; where one of those ponies sees something boring, practical, simple, harmonious,” Every word was spat out with increasing venom, until he grinned savagely (another meaningless expression when the listener is essentially blind). “You lot, you see art, and stories, and insane happenstances, and twist reality around your finger until it caves in to your demands. And, in that way, you and I are rather alike.”

Ol Coup coiled around Selim a few times in a mockery of an embrace before pulling up Selim’s head and poking the immobile human on his nose, uttering a “Boop” noise as he did so.

“The ponies gain strength by surrendering to the world’s demands; we gain it by challenging what should happen with what we want to happen. Food for thought, isn’t it?”

Ol Coup nonchalantly examined at his claws before snatching Mercy’s limb out of Selim’s grip.

“Interesting escape, by the way. It was quite fun to watch, anyway. Two and a half stars out of five, though, because I had to give the rest of them a bit of story-time while you waited for the wall to burn down. Try better next time; an audience doesn’t normally want to participate in the story, after all.”

Selim felt compelled to walk away at that point, if only because the mad god had begun playing with the leg as if it were a doll and was cheerfully giving compliments to whoever crafted it in a Basso Profondo voice, but Selim was forced to suffer this indignity for an additional thirty minutes until he could feel his legs again. It was an effort, however, as his mind caught up with the concept of oxygen deprivation, and his brain blearily painted the world in smears of color as he eventually rose and stumbled, unseeing and unthinking, into the EverFree forest.

***

Discord stared after Selim for a few moments, then offhandedly tossed the leg over his shoulder and grimaced, brushing his hands against his chest almost as if he were trying to clean them off. It was fun, after all, to see conflict. It was fun to see two groups fight and drink and peruse all the miserable little enjoyments that enabled mortal life to be tolerable. It was fun to see friends break apart, or to play with the little ponies and make them do things they would normally never even think of, the stuck up little twits. There were many things, Discord felt, that made life quite amusing for him.

This, however, was most certainly not entertaining. Oh, it had been, when the pony and the human had fought each other and danced around like drunken ballerinas; the end, however, with its brutality and swiftness, had left the Draconequus feeling somewhat. . . empty. It wouldn’t be fair to call it guilt, really, but that hint of fear he had felt when he realized his toys were breaking each other, if looked at under a distorted microscope, might have been perceivable as such. It was the reason why Discord had specifically refrained from inducing outright war between the species, or degrading himself to simple murder; it was the sort of greed that might eventually be trained into a conscience, that his enjoyment would suffer if others were removed from the game.

He shook his head for a moment, then disappeared; left behind was a startlingly blue field of flowers, no trace of the leg remaining. . .

Author's Note:

Around and around we go, how many down-votes, nobody knows!

Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed the chapter.

Yes, you, specifically.

The one reading from the computer/cellphone.