A Beginner's Guide to Heroism

by LoyalLiar

IV - The Trial and Execution of the Traitor, Mortal Coil

Chapter IV
The Trial and Execution of the Traitor, Mortal Coil

“I didn’t do it.”

As I mentioned before, those words were the second most physically painful I ever uttered in my life. Unfortunately for those of you who find yourselves amused by my suffering, that pain was fairly drawn out. In the moment, the only injury I got was a rather strong-hoofed body blow from Silhouette.

“Save your breath, Mortal,” she told me, just as her punch was stealing it away. “You’re gonna need it for later.”

I sucked down two breaths, trying to ignore the pain in my abdomen, and then looked square at Silhouette. “Are you… really hitting on me? Now?”

“Well, I don’t exactly have a lot of time left.” She slapped my cheek. I think she wanted it to be a sort of cutesy pat, but her coat was made of solid gemstones, so it hurt. A lot. “You’ve been playing hard-to-get all these years.”

“You’re disgusting, Silhouette” With my forehooves bound above my head, my best option for an ‘attack’ was to spit on her face.

She bucked me in the jaw, and smiled about it. Creepy smiling, to the degree that I wondered if she was getting off on it, just a little. “Commander Silhouette.”

As a younger stallion, I really didn’t know when to shut up. So instead of realizing that there was literally nothing to do to stop her from punching me as much as she wanted and holding my tongue, I grinned back. “Oh! Oh, I finally get it. Commander like Hurricane the Butcher! That’s why! You must have won so many battles!”

I knew the number, of course. Silhouette was only a few years older than I was, and the Union hadn’t been in a war in over twenty years. She had never had the opportunity to prove herself.

I also knew I’d hit a nerve. As you might expect, she hit back. After three or four blows, including one that cut my cheek, her hoof was stopped midway to my throat by a glow of green magic. The little black void crystal Silhouette wore around her neck quickly ate the arcana, exactly as it was intended to do, but it had been enough to stop the blow and that was all that mattered to me.

“Thanks, Your Majesty.”

The crystalline alicorn walked slowly into my cell, flanked by guardsponies, offering me a glare of unbridled fury, which surprised me given the rumors I’d heard about how she dealt with her enemies.

Not that I was hoping for any more pain. Four hours of on-and-off napping in a dungeon cell under the Crystal Spire weren’t exactly my idea of a comfortable night, but I understood well enough how it must have looked to walk in and find Wintershimmer comatose and me laying unconscious over him. I was grateful the candlecorns hadn’t killed me outright, and only wished that Silhouette hadn’t had her chance to bludgeon me to the verge of nausea before I explained my innocence.

In addition to my assorted bruises and cuts, my head was throbbing as magic slowly and forcefully drained out of my horn. I’d built up enough mana back into my system in those few hours to stand on my own (though I didn’t have much choice in the matter, as manacles around my forelegs held my hooves over my head on a chain run up to the ceiling. A suppressing ring of void crystal screwed into the enamel of my horn made sure I wasn’t about to use that spell any time soon. It also served a wonderful second purpose: stinging to the high heavens, like a cactus dipped in lemon juice and wrapped loosely in poison ivy being slowly rubbed over an open wound.

“You killed Wintershimmer,” Jade observed, standing next to me with her judgemental eyes.

I sighed. “The spell went wrong, Your Majesty. But I wasn’t trying to kill him. And in my defense, he technically isn’t dead.” The furrow in her brow grew deeper. “Just comatose… forever. Because his soul is gone. But I can fix that.”

Silhouette and one of Jade’s personal bodyguards laughed at me. Another smiled sarcastically as he drew his hoof across his neck. They were really great ponies, those three. Just classy in every imaginable way.

Jade herself leaned forward. “What game are you playing, Coil?”

“I’m a necromancer. Maybe I’m the best alive in the world, for the moment. I can put a soul back into a living body easy. Since he’s still biologically alive, it will be like nothing went wrong in the first place.”

“Do you honestly expect to feign innocence?” Jade asked, gritting her teeth at me. They glowed in the reflection of her sparkling green coat, and attached to a happier face, they might have looked quite fetching. The way she emphasized that sentence, though, offered no boon to her appearance. A sinking feeling in my gut shouted to me that I was missing something.

I swallowed, tilting my neck up to accommodate the bobbing of my throat. “What’s wrong?”

Silhouette stepped forward, and reached into a pouch strapped over her back. Out of it came a short blade. It rang in the crystal room as it clattered on the floor, dropped at Jade’s hooves. “Did you think we wouldn’t find the knife?”

I recognized the short blade; as much as it belonged to anypony it was mine. I used it to prepare the trivial collection of potions we used to preserve Smart Cookie while waiting for Wintershimmer’s magic to restore him.

I had no explanation for the bloodstain on its leading edge.

“The candle ponies came to find me,” Queen Jade explained.

“Candlecorns,” I corrected, once more demonstrating my younger self’s painful lack of restraint.

Silhouette punched me in the gut, winding me, before Jade continued. “You were slumped over Wintershimmer, apparently restrained by the three golems. Wintershimmer was dead. You had slit his throat.”

I swallowed.

“Do you have anything to say in your defence?”

Silhouette chuckled. “What could he possibly say? He already tried to cover it up.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I told them. “I mean, I made a mistake with the spell we were working on, and that ripped out his soul, but I didn’t stab him!”

“Then who did?” Silhouette asked, leaning forward to dominate my entire field of view. “Nopony else would have known Wintershimmer was vulnerable, and nopony is stupid enough to try and kill him while he’s awake.”

“I don’t know,” I protested, though my gut reaction was that I was staring the mare in the face at that very moment. Silhouette had every motivation to frame me for murder, and her freakish ability to sneak into sealed places and disappear in plain sight made me suspect it was well within her power to have done the deed. I just needed evidence.

I smiled, picking up my prior thought. “But I have an idea how to find out.”

Silhouette raised a brow that I took as subdued worry. It was Queen Jade, though, who spoke up. “What do you propose?”

“Just ask Wintershimmer.” Jade blinked in incredulity as I continued. “He might not have actually seen the killing blow, but he can tell you what happened with me was an accident. I had nothing to do with murder.”

The response I got from the Queen settled slowly from shock into a scowl. “Need I remind you that you are accused of his murder?”

I shrugged—an impressive feat with your forelegs bound over your head. “So there’s a minor inconvenience. Just seance him; it isn’t even hard. His soul is in the Summer Lands.”

“You said that before. The ‘Summer Lands’. What do you mean?”

I rolled my eyes in yet another progression down the long road of increasingly flagrant displays of my lack of personal restraint. “That’s the ‘Gallery’, if you’re still clinging to ‘the Artist’ as a real god. But seeing as the Equestrians have actually met their gods in the flesh—”

I don’t recall who slapped me in the face, but judging by the fact that the force picked me up off the ground, I suspect it had to have been Queen Jade herself.

“Blasphemy in the face of death?” For just a moment, she looked like she pitied me. “Well, it isn’t as if the Artist would ever forgive murder anyway—even of a pony with a past like Wintershimmer’s.”

Jade’s horn burst into green flame—literal flame, not the usual glow of a unicorn’s magic. It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned it was simply a sign of her anger overflowing through her pegasus magic. All I knew in the moment was that it was unknown, and powerful, and thus equal parts entrancing and terrifying.

Compared to that awesome sight, the smell of mild ozone and the simple pop of an apprentice’s unpracticed seance were, frankly, a disappointment.

Wintershimmer looked at Jade, and then turned to me, halfway transparent. The shape of his soul was a lot younger than I’d ever known him to be; probably forty or so, with enough of a mane to actually conceal the base of his horn, and devoid of three quarters of the wrinkles that usually lined his face. He stood upright fully, not relying on a staff to brace arthritic knees.

I struggled to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry, Master.”

He smiled. “There’s no need to apologize. I’m proud of you, Coil.”

The words were like a slap in the face. “What? Master, I’m not sure—”

“I didn’t think you had it in you,” he continued, pacing around me. “It’s been at least two hundred years since an apprentice managed to usurp an archmage’s title. It occurred to me that I’d be putting my life in your hooves, but with all your playing at being ‘a hero’, I never thought you’d be able to do the deed.”

Silhouette clapped hooves against the floor in mock applause. “Oh, I can’t believe it… For a second, I was worried you actually hadn’t done it, Mortal.”

“I didn’t! It was an accident!”

Wintershimmer sighed. “You have very little ground left at this point; I doubt there is any use in denial. If you’re going to call yourself the Archmage of the Crystal Union, you need to live up to the title. I’m assuming from the ring on your horn that Jade walked in while you were still recovering from the assassination?”

“Wintershimmer, please! Listen! I was trying to warn you! You remember, I said I couldn’t hold the spell any longer?”

“I seem to remember somewhat different words.”

The tone of those words was different from whatever else he’d said. It was subtle, the rise in pitch, like the words were coming out tilted. His words were speaking to Jade, but his tone was saying something different.

He continued with words that sent ice down my back. “You said there wasn't anything left for me to teach you. That I didn’t mean anything to you anymore.”

“I’ve heard enough,” Jade growled. Turning her attention fully to Wintershimmer. “I’m sorry to have lost you.”

Wintershimmer’s ghost shrugged. “Don’t pretend to shed tears for me. Coil and I were poisoning Cookie so you’d rely on us. Feed him plain bread and water, and he will recover, Jade. His own magic can do that much. You’ll only be waiting a few months at most.”

I hope you trust me enough reading this to understand that I had no idea of Wintershimmer’s ploy. It didn’t surprise me much, granted, but I certainly wasn’t a conspirator.

“Wintershimmer!”

Setting his withered lips together, he spoke to her firmly. “You ought to let Coil go. Banish him, if you want, but don’t dishonor our traditions as mages for an admirable display of ambition.”

“He is a murderer,” Jade countered. “And he hurt Cookie. Our laws are perfectly clear.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to understand.” Wintershimmer turned to me. “At least you can call yourself ‘Archmage’ for a few hours. Do you know what you want your epithet to be?”

Jade dismissed him before I could answer. I was a little angry about that, so I turned to look her square in the eye and answered the question anyway.

“Coil the Immortal.”

She scoffed. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

The other guards left after their leader, but Silhouette stayed behind for a moment. “You want a kiss, Coil? Last chance.”

“What, and contract something terminal?”

She slammed the door on the way out.

At this point, there’s something you need to understand about me. I wasn’t insane; I didn’t think I was going to survive the anger of a vengeful alicorn and her army of magically resistant soldiers. At the time, all the bravado and the talk were a coping mechanism I’d learned from Wintershimmer. Focusing my attention on the next bit of wit I could spit in my opponent’s faces kept me from paying too much attention to my impending death.

Once I was left alone in that small, damp stone room, illuminated only by the light between cell bars, cut off from every drop of my magic, I panicked for nearly an hour.

---

When I came out of the Spire’s dungeons, and emerged onto glimmering crystal streets, I paid close attention to what the ponies who I had formerly considered my neighbors saw. I walked with my head high, ignoring their jibes as they mocked the pony they expected to soon see swaying in the wind. I even smiled at them, deliberately not in a friendly way, but cocky. I wanted them to know I wasn’t afraid.

And I wasn’t. ‘Afraid’ didn’t do my feelings any kind of justice. I was terrified. I felt like my teeth were rattling in my skull. The ‘plan’ I had come up with, if one could even call it that, was reliant on a completely untested magic trick: not a spell, but the kind of ‘illusion’ you see from grifters on street corners. And I was not a magician. If my sleight of hoof screwed up even slightly, I was going to wind up slight of neck. I was certain I couldn’t be any more afraid.

At this point, reading my memoir, some readers may be comforting themselves thinking ‘oh, but he went on to write this whole story, so obviously he doesn’t just die at the beginning’, or something like that. Let me remind you that not a dozen paragraphs ago, you saw a murdered stallion literally summoned from the Summer Lands to tell a story not terribly unlike this one.

Besides, what good is a hanging without at least a little bit of suspense?

Ahead of me were the gallows, raised tall enough that all of Union City could gather in the big square and look up at me. Enough rope that the platform under my hooves wouldn’t block their view of the swaying or squirming stallion. Basically, a fun time for the whole family. Bring your foals.

Jade was already up there, tying the knot herself. That Silhouette was nowhere to be seen surprised me. The only explanation I could think of was that the allegation of poisoning Smart Cookie had made my offenses ‘personal’ to her. Jade was in her full armor, painted a rather muted turquoise that only drew further attention to the spaces where her glimmering green coat sparkled through. As I reached the base of the stairs, she finished her work and turned to the crowd. Magic carried her voice amongst the masses.

“Crystal ponies! Look here.” Her long, slender alicorn hoof gestured in my direction. “You know his name. Mortal Coil, formerly the apprentice to our Archmage, Wintershimmer.”

The masses booed, and I was honestly unsure whether they liked me more or less than my former mentor. Wintershimmer’s particular brand of morality left him fairly low on most ponies lists of ‘favorite ponies’; usually only slightly above the universally despised Hurricane the Butcher.

Queen Jade appeared not to care who the crowd actually hated. “Earlier today, Mortal betrayed Wintershimmer, and murdered him in cold blood.”

Stepping up onto the podium, I hissed at Jade. “Don’t call me that.”

In typical monarchical fashion, she ignored me. “His actions have not only taken a life, but betrayed our nation. The Crystal Union is less for the loss of our archmage. Our laws our clear. We will not allow a traitor or a murderer to live among us.”

At that point in her speech, I puffed up my cheeks, scrunched my eyes together, and let the slightest trickle of magic move up into my horn. As I had expected, the magic was quickly eaten by the ring suppressing my power. I hadn’t quite expected the little spark of feedback that shot through the crack in my horn’s enamel left over from my failure with Wintershimmer, but the surge of light it offered me actually helped my plan.

Every pony in the crowd saw me struggling and failing to remove the ring on my horn. A couple laughed. Jade looked at me with malice.

“Any last words, Mortal?”

“I’ll…” I wheezed a little, out of breath. “…let you know in… fifty years.”

A few ponies in the front rows of the audience, close enough to hear my unamplified wheezing, laughed at my open spite of my impending death.

The crystal guards nudged me toward the noose, their lances pointed in my direction with substantial prejudice. I managed two steps before my tired legs gave out, and I fell to a knee. I was hoping the motion would garner me a bit of sympathy, but instead, it got me a jab in the flank from an impatient guard. “Keep moving, traitor.”

“Fine… fine.” I pushed myself forward, stepped up, and stuck my own head through the noose.

Turns out, you can always be more afraid.

My right leg twitched in exhaustion, and slipped on the still-closed trapdoor. Leaning heavily into it, I felt the noose tighten around my neck; certainly not fatally, nor even particularly dangerously, but enough to leave me more than a bit short of breath. As my tired legs cried out, I leaned my head against the rope, feeling the thirteen loops press against the side of my muzzle, and lip around the middle of my horn.

I focused everything I had into what might be the hardest spell I knew how to cast, knowing that the magic was going to be wasted into the ring on my brow.

Magic surged from my horn, visibly. The ponies in the crowd called me a coward, laughing and pointing.

Jade nodded. Her guard pulled a lever.

I felt the world shift as my heart flew into my neck and the world spun.

And then, before their eyes, the noose clamped shut on empty air.

---

The thing about a hangmare’s noose is that it can ultimately be reduced to a series of slipknots chained together ad nauseum. If you leave slack in one of the loops up the series, that loop is going to pull tight first, and the one on the very end, where an unfortunate neck is placed, is only going to snap shut after all the slack in the other loops are pulled taught. I’m exceptionally glad that’s the way they work, but on that unfortunate day, I was just sort of guessing.

To emphasize the important part, if you loosen one of the loops, even just a little, it will pull tight first.

My second proposition that I wasn’t actually sure about, since I didn’t have the luxury of testing it, comes as follows: the body weight of an adult unicorn applied in a sudden burst is enough force to yank screws out of the enamel of a horn.

All the show of wheezing and being tired was just an act. Well… sort of just an act. Really, I was about to pass out from all the mana I’d spent that day, but it was more important that everypony watching knew that was how I felt. That way, they wouldn’t think twice when I leaned into the rope, and pointed my horn directly against one of the loops on the hangmare’s knot. Once I found a loop with the tip of my horn, I let my leg give out even more, and actually pierced the knot with my horn so that the rope would slide down to where the guards had fastened the void crystal ring.

Once all that was set up, all I had to do was start casting a teleportation spell, and hope I didn’t run out of mana before Jade decided to let me drop. If I had run out, I would have popped the ring off my horn, and then promptly died anyway. But since Jade was kind enough to stop me from ‘humiliating’ myself by looking like a coward (in addition to a murderer and a traitor), I still had mana going when the ring ripped off. As soon as it was gone, the spell flared up and fired—just in time to keep the loop around my neck from getting tight. Instead, the ponies of the Crystal Union got a crack of thunder and a work of magic to tell stories about.

In turn, I got a rope burn on my neck and four long gouges in the enamel of my horn that would take a week to grow back. I also won a crippling migraine that haunted me for the entirety of the next day. But that’s not all! My final prizes were a nice fall into a snowbank some distance outside the walls of the city and blissful, precious unconsciousness as the last of my mana fled from my body.

Comments

[RexDraconum]

Noooooo! Neeeeeeed more chapterssssss! Noooooo!

[RoboRed]

Clever.

Wintershimmer’s ghost shrugged. “Don’t pretend to shed tears for me. Coil and I were poisoning Cookie so you’d rely on us. Feed him plain bread and water, and he will recover, Jade. His own magic can do that much. You’ll only be waiting a few months.”

Wintershimmer, you absolute scum...

[UnbelievablyDeadCultist]

Hmmm, this certainly is an interesting story. Keep the good work up.

[ponygrad]

These chapter pictures really help set the mood

[LoyalLiar]

8825883
Ruirik does them; he's fantastic. If you ever happen to be looking for a commission, he comes highly recommended.

Unfortunately, at the moment there are some later chapters where I've gotten ahead of him, but arts are coming.

[Julian the Dreamer]

And Coil once again surprises me.

[Spellflame]

Heyyy I called it