• Published 10th Feb 2015
  • 2,286 Views, 40 Comments

A Dazzling Tale - Darkmetroidz



Adagio and the Dazzlings have fallen onto hard times since the Battle of the Bands. Will they be able to overcome the loss of their powers, or have the Sirens sang their final song together?

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Prologue

Adagio sat in the window of her third-story apartment, looking at the moon, trying to hold back tears. She looked over her shoulder at a clock mounted on the wall. The time read 11:30. Sonata and Aria were already in bed, exhausted from a long and arduous day. After their pendants were broken during the battle of the bands, their lives had gone into a nosedive. They were working dead-end jobs after school just to keep up with rent on their dinky little apartment. Adagio remembered the good times; when they lived in Equestria, where there was more magic to feast upon than they could ever possibly consume. Even their early years of their banishment to Earth hadn't been too bad, in hindsight. When they had first been banished, they had been doing well for themselves, haunting the seas of Greece, seducing sailors to their dooms. Greece had been wonderful. Their culture was rife with magic, and there was plenty of opportunity for them to feed. But the golden age of the Greeks ended, and the Sirens had been forced to move on.

By that point, they had to learn to be more subtle. The Greeks never saw anything odd about singing women in the ocean. Their mysticism had made them easy prey. But as time passed, humans became more skeptical, and less willing to hear the songs of women who suddenly appeared before them. For years, they had eked out an existence on the edge of the woods, preying on the most druidic, mystical groups in Europe. First the Gauls, then the Britons, then the Lithuanian Pagans.

The Middle Ages had posed significant threat to their lives with the rise of Christian zealotry. Threats of witchcraft had been levied against them on numerous occasions. Sonata had almost been burned alive once in France. Only quick thinking by Adagio had saved her from a mob of angry peasants. But they persevered. And once the Renaissance began, they were once again able to thrive.

Vienna had been Adagio's idea. Then again, every sane decision they ever made had been Adagio's idea. They trekked their way from France to Austria in the 1600's to take advantage of a new musical phenomenon; opera. They hated the music with a burning passion, the very sound of it was like nails into their ears. Aria especially found the style abhorrent. But they had never lived as well as they did when they sung in the concert halls of Vienna. They became staggeringly wealthy, and were able to work their magic on vast crowds of people, which kept the three Sirens very full, and very happy. Germans and Austrians alike flocked to hear them sing. The language, so angry in its spoken form, appealed heavily to Adagio. She didn't care if they ever left. They owned a large manor, beautiful clothes, staggeringly beautiful jewels, and more gold than they could ever spend.

But, of course, they had decided to listen to Sonata.

In retrospect, Adagio should've known that anything that came out of Sonata's vapid little brain was not worth considering, but she had decided to give Sonata a chance. They were always on the lookout for the most magical places on earth, places that had ties to Equestria, or strong magical forces of their own that they could exploit. Sonata had pointed out a backwater nation thousands of miles away that had recently taken a break from their obsession with living on dirt farms and producing little inbred hick babies to start a war with themselves and slaughter each other en masse. For some reason, people from all across Europe started flocking to go there, presumably to get jobs and start little inbred hick families of their own.

So, on July 19th 1884 (Adagio still had the tickets) they had packed up a few belongings they could carry with them, and joined droves of Austrians, Germans, and Italians as they crammed themselves onto boats in Genoa to relocate to the United States of America.

Truthfully, the opportunity had seemed too good to be true. Germans they were not, but Americans had a beautiful tendency toward hatred and violence. Adagio saw it everywhere; it manifested in the cities as gangs of Jews, Polacks and Guidos battled each other in the streets of Brooklyn. She saw it in the south, as terrorist groups like the Ku Kluxes tormented blacks. Everyone, it seemed, hated each other. Poor hates rich, Democrat hates Republican, city-dweller hates country hick. It seemed the negative energy was so abundant that they would be feasting on unimaginable sums of power.

But unlike Europeans, getting an audience to sing to proved more difficult than Adagio had hoped. Opera had never caught on like it did in Austria, and as a result, the Sirens had been forced to peddle themselves as street performers, singing little songs to rile up emotions. Which, again, proved difficult. Adagio spoke fluent Greek, German, English, and French, but the smattering of languages in New York had proven overwhelming. Polish, Italian, Hebrew, Russian, and dozens more made up the rainbow of tongues that were spoken commonly. The Siren's melodies were enchanting for sure, but when their audience couldn't understand the lyrics, their spells' effects were trivial at best. The next forty years were hard on the Sirens. They travelled by train from New York to Chicago to Sacramento and back again, never being able to find somewhere they could lay down roots like Vienna. But then their salvation came: jazz.

Like the rest of the country, the nineteen-twenties were something of a party for the Sirens. They had done okay for themselves during the World War, using their songs to rile up hatred for the Germans. In truth, it pained Adagio to slander the nation that had fed her, clothed her, and treated her like a queen, but the gnawing hunger inside her had forced her to sing war songs anyway. But promoting the war had only kept her from starving. The jazz age was the first time in decades Adagio had felt full.

The music was hypnotic. Even Aria had a little fun as a jazzman. And for a few years they did well. They were living in an upscale penthouse in Manhattan, singing to different packed clubs every night, socializing with gangsters and getting drunk on illegal alcohol. Then the Great Depression hit, and everything went to hell. For the second time since they had arrived in the States, they were wanderers on the streets, sleeping in boxcars and just barely generating enough energy to survive. They roamed the nation, barely staving off the pains of hunger. For the first time, Adagio sympathized with humans. Everyone, it seemed, was hungry.

It took until after the Second World War for them to finally eat well again. When Pop music became mainstream, the Sirens hit their stride. They rode out the fifties to well past the year 2000 as pop singers, disappearing and reappearing every few years with a new look and a new stage name, among other things, stinting as Spice Girls.

Their luck took an unexpected turn for the worse a few years ago. The style of music shifted again, this one more heavily reliant on using computerized effects in lieu of good singing or instrumentation. They learned quickly that their voices had no effect on people once their songs had met the business end of a computer. So they were forced to abandoned professional singing, and retreat to more desperate measures.

They spent a few years roaming, sowing anger and feeding off it in small doses. They always had gnawing pains in their stomachs. Without access to concerts worth of people, they couldn't gather enough power to sate their hunger.

Then opportunity hit them in the face as they fed in a cafe; Equestrian magic, coming from the Element of Magic. Adagio had given up on trying to tap into their old world's power, but this was the chance they had been seeking for more than two thousand years; to reclaim their full power, and rule over this world.

Two millennia of hopes, squashed by Twilight Sparkle and her band of idiots. One fateful song and rainbow blast, and the Sirens found their pendants reduced to shards, their powers gone with the gemstones.

Without their pendants, and the powers of song that came with them, the Dazzlings immediately fell on hard times. Ironically, while feeding had been their primary concern since their banishment, Adagio's stomach was the only part of her that wasn't giving her grief. While distinctly less satisfying than feeding on bad feelings, normal food had the benefit of being much easier to obtain. Granted, much more ramen and Aria would be liable to kill someone, but Sonata had proved herself semi-useful as a cook, and managed to make the noodles at least halfway palatable.

Adagio returned her gaze skyward. She had spent two more than two thousand years with Aria and Sonata. Together they had persevered through disaster beyond disaster. The Huns, the Mongols, the Plague, the Inquisition, the seemingly endless wars fought by Austria against France, the Turks, and Russia. They had weathered through Napoleon, two world wars, and had managed to survive and even thrive in America. Throughout history, the three sirens had maintained their sisterhood, pushing forward onto tomorrow. But Twilight Sparkle had done something that not even the streets of the Depression had been able to do. She had made Adagio hate them.

Adagio, Aria, and Sonata's relationship had become ever rockier in the last few months. The only reason they were living in this downtown dump of an apartment was because none of them could find a job that could put a roof over their head alone. It was not the millennia of cooperation and even... friendship that kept them together anymore. It was a simple sense of practicality. Adagio could feel Aria and Sonata drifting away from her. They were the only family Adagio had. Humans died too fast. Look away for a few decades and they were gone. But Adagio had always known that her friends would be there with her forever. Aria and Sonata were like sisters to Adagio. They were the only people besides herself Adagio cared about.

Adagio's fists clenched as she thought. I won't lose them. She swore. With the moon as my witness, I won't lose Aria and Sonata. And I will make them pay for what they've done to us.