Diary of the Dead

by AppleTank

32: The Empress of Crystal

Fortunately, Plan P still had spare rooms, though Quartave considered adding expansion efforts to a future project. It would probably be unlikely for people like them for their numbers to go down, after all. Stalci Coda was housed in one of these rooms; Gladas and Quartave decided that they should figure out if Coda had any information on Sombra she could share.

Plus, she likely had several questions of her own. Best not to have an angry alicorn in their base, no matter how inexperienced, with her wards and chains broken.

Quiet paws walked up the stairs and carefully pushed open the guest room. Gladas opened her beak, but paused. Stalci was standing in front of a floor-length mirror. Unlike the time she was just pulled out of the tower, the Crystallian mare was clean. Grime, dried blood, tangled mane, all washed away like a distant memory.

But the scars, the sunken eyes, the hollow cheeks, they were not something that can be so easily washed away in a bath. Her eyes slowly drifted along her new wings and horn, neither of which matched in color to her own.

“How are you feeling?” Gladas asked, head slightly bowed. Quartave stepped back into the shadows of the hallway instead.

“I had endured years locked within that wretch’s tower,” Stalci said, still staring in the mirror. “Yet now that I’m free, I find myself lonelier than before.” A brittle smile tried and failed to make it onto her face.

Gladas stepped in, and laid a cautious talon on the pony’s shoulder. “You will not be lacking sympathetic ears here,” she said. “Many of us are outcasts too, whether by choice or without. If you would like to meet with them, I can help arrange that.”

Stalci blinks, eyes finally moving off herself and onto the griffoness towering over her, yet with her head slightly tucked in. She closed her eyes and sighed, moving in to tap her neck against Gladas’s. “I think I would like that.”

There was a moment of somewhat tense silence. “I admit to a secondary reason for us being here,” Gladas said, shooting Quartave a glance. “We’ve been … trying to investigate Sombra for some time. We’d like to think ourselves wardens of this type of magical research. Can you give us an overview of what happened in the Crystal Empire to help us understand the sequence of events? I’d like to hope-“ Gladas’s talons tense slightly, “-it will prevent further occurrences.”

Stalci glanced between the two griffons, and gave a small shrug, her wings bobbing uncoordinatedly. “I’m not sure how much I could tell, but I’ll do what I can.” Her eyes glazed, her posture pulled in slightly, as she dived into a past and still present hurts. “Maybe Sombra believed his own promises, for the first few years. Or perhaps we were too cynical. The scars of Discord’s rampage were still so fresh, Sombra’s conviction was hypnotic. We wanted to believe him too.

She unconsciously rubbed the side of her ribs. “Every few months, he had new ideas to strengthen us, if he just had more resources. Too late did we realize he only wanted strength for himself. I was one of the first to suspect his interests were self-serving.

“I tried confronting him over it. He gave up all pretenses of subtlety. His protective gifts to my Guard were poisoned, and left them helpless when the trap was activated. I was overthrown in hours. We were already diverting resources towards our crystal mines for some sort of defensive array Sombra was promoting. Now, he was forcing us. Any who disagreed with his propositions were chained and sent to the mines. Any who didn’t display full-hearted assent were sent to the mines.

“The enchanted armor was not to protect the pony wearing it, but Sombra himself. They dug into the pony’s psyche, compelling them to defend the new King. We were perhaps fortunate that production was bottlenecked by the mine’s output, and fighting for resources with Sombra’s other projects, or he would have put the damn helmets on us all.

“But I was a special case. I and a few others were instead forced to construct our own prisons, one of the towers ringing the Empire. Sombra needed ponies for his experiments, and selected those that angered him the most. The enchantments Sombra wanted to try were getting increasingly dangerous, which meant of course he was going to have somepony else take the risk for him. He separated the stages across us, so there would be no chance of us happening upon a fighting chance. The unlucky ones, were … harvested, if Sombra had no further use. Though I wonder how fortunate I really am. Did … did you find anyone else?”

“In your tower? No,” Gladas replied. “I am unsure what secrets lie within the rest, for my people feared we would alert Sombra if we went in too early. We wanted to give him no chance of expecting us. When the winds calm, we will send another team to investigate.”

Stalci sighed and inclined her head. “That’s probably all I can hope for. Thank you. I’m not sure where I’d be without you.”

Quartave hissed, grimacing, stepping into the room for the first time. “Perhaps in not so catastrophic a mess. I’d like to apologize.”

Stalci blinked at Quartave in surprise, before shaking it off. “What? How come?”

“You might want to sit down,” Quartave advised. “This may not be pleasant.”

After Stalci was seated, Quartave grumbled and said, “I was careless, naïve, and drunk on my own cleverness. I thought myself the master of this land, and blind to anything outside it. When a gray, angry colt came up to our doorstep, I ignored him. He didn’t figure into my plans, and therefore, inconsequential. But he was intelligent, too intelligent. I gave him little, yet he was able to figure everything out from first principles anyways. If I didn’t know any better, it was his talent. And he used it to dominate your home. If I realized what kind of pony he would become, I could have him tracked, monitored for concerning behavior. He walked straight over my talons and I let him go. And for that, I am sorry.”

Stalci stared at her, eyes wide and jaw hanging. “He … he just appeared from nowhere, filled with new, strange, exotic ideas, and took over before we even realized it. We were powerless … and he came from you. He came from you!” She leapt off the bed and crashed into Quartave, hooves wrapped around the elder griffoness’s neck as both slammed into the wall behind them. Quartave winced, but made no moves as Stalci shook, tears streaming down her face. The Empress raised a hoof; Quartave’s eyes glanced towards it, then closed them. Before Stalci could punch down, Gladas caught her arm.

“I bear responsibility too,” Gladas snorted, glaring at Quartave. “I should have watched what he was researching more closely.”

“And you went to me with your suspicions; I dismissed you,” Quartave countered from the floor. “Maybe if we had locked him out, he would have still found his knowledge elsewhere. But his behavior should have set off enough warning flags to put him under some cursory surveillance. I forgot the entire point of our little enterprise was to leave no trails leading to us so we could be forgotten by history, and now Sombra just brought it back into public consciousness. We must track down the buzz the colt’s display had kicked up and rewrite its history. We must become a lost relic of time.”

Gladas let go of Stalci’s foreleg as the mare started wriggling. “That’s all fine for you,” the pseudo alicorn said, taking a few steps away from them. “But my ponies are still gone.”

Quartave wiggled a talon. “Perhaps not.”

“What?”

“Sombra is too egotistical to try for scorched earth. That was almost definitely a delaying tactic. He will return eventually. And of course …” Quartave gestured at her wings and horn. “Whether or not those attachments of yours work like those Equestrian’s, we can ensure you live long enough to get your revenge. What do you think about joining forces, hmm?”

Stalci stared at the downed griffoness for a moment, chewing on her lip. “I … hold on.” She took even more steps away. “Was that a recruitment scheme? What is wrong with you!?”

“Can you blame me?” Quartave said, sitting up and shrugging. “I was just told what a massive mistake it was to give Sombra as much free reign as I did. Either we work together or pretend to have never existed. It’s alright if you have your own priorities, only a third of the members here are actually onboard the founding objectives, but I need to be sure whatever resources I spread out will be unlikely to be turned against me and mine.”

“And the townsponies? Are all of them in your club too?” Stalci demanded.

A cold grin spread over Quartave’s face. “We’ve been established in Appleton for over two generations. Their great-grandparents may have been wary of us, and rightly so, but their children, and their children’s children have known us all their lives. We are a permanent fixture now. They will trust me more than you. If you wish to strike out on your own, that’s fine, but it will be the last time we make contact, and you better hope you can explain Sombra’s permanent stain upon you. If you wish to work with us, trust me, we know a little bit about long grudges.”

“That does not fill me with confidence,” Stalci said in a deadpan.

Quartave shrugged. “Unlike the locals, if you accept you’d be joining us for the long haul. I want to make sure you, and any who wish to hitch their boat to ours, including the townsponies who wish to train with us, know exactly who they’ll be dealing with. I fully admit to being a paranoid, selfish, vengeful piece of shit. Gladas over there has been concocting plans to assassinate me since the first time we’ve met. But our goals align for the most part, and I’ve been keeping within her boundaries to avoid further antagonizing her, so we’re still working together. I do not wish to surprise you. Even if you accepted immediately, I would have laid out these warnings first before finalizing.

“We deal almost exclusively with forbidden magic: necromancy, necrokinesis, blood magic, body modification, soul manipulation, control of dark spirits, though most of us are also decent casters of more standard fare. In fact, with the exception of—” Quartave’s face briefly twisted, “—Sombra’s leak, we are likely the sole living repository of such research.”

“And how can you ensure that now? Especially since Sombra’s own work is out there.”

“For the first, we had personally ensured that the original sources were burned down from the inside and out; Falcowolf, no, the other one, helped me set it up in that regard. As for the rest, we’ll deal with them the same way we dealt with Sombra. Anyone that steps out of line, anyone who may lead back to us, we’ll make sure they don’t. Now, I ask again, do you find this acceptable?”

Stalci side, wings slumping. “It sounds like I don’t have much of a choice.”

“Oh there’s always a choice. I just like making mine the best one.”

Gladas rolled her eyes and moved to Stalci’s side. “You don’t have to deal with her constantly if you don’t want to. There are others here you can shadow, including myself.”

“Ok, alright.” Stalci closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. She exhaled, then touched a hoof over her chest. “I, Stalci Coda, accept your invitation to join your group.”

Quartave stood up and bowed her head. “I, Quartave, welcome you to the Honeycomb Club.”

“I, Gladas Falcowolf, also welcome you.” Said griffon stuck a talon out and shook hooves with the pseudo-alicorn mare. “Come with me. I’ll introduce you to the rest.”