L - The Death of Mortal Coil
L
The Death of Mortal Coil
“Morty?”
I opened my eyes in a rather pleasant skyscape. Billowy white clouds floated in a void of blue, but below me, there was no ground. My hooves were standing on nothing.
I also quickly realized my hooves were translucent, which removed the last confusion from my actions.
“Morty?” a voice called again. It sounded… familiar. But so much more sad.
I turned to find Celestia standing behind me, much more physically present than my ghostly form. The goddess was crying.
“Why?” she asked.
I frowned. “Why what?”
“I could have helped you, Morty.”
I recall being confused before it came flooding back. The duel. The death. The plan.
I swallowed. “Is this the Summer Lands?”
The question only seemed to hurt Celestia. “Morty, I need to know why. You’re a good pony… or you were… but what am I supposed to tell Gale?”
“Celestia, listen to me.”
“No, Morty, you listen to me—”
“Celestia, shut up, or I am actually going to die. Now is not the time for some mentorly discussion of self-sacrifice or heroism. This is the plan.”
That comment, a verbal slap to the face, made the immortal actually shake her head in confusion. “What?”
“No time. I’ve already been here too long already. I wasn’t expecting to be so disoriented. Send me to the Summer Lands. Now.”
“Morty… you are actually dead.”
“Yes, I think that’s fairly obvious. Again, that’s the plan. Sorry for urgency. Now, please, send me to the Summer Lands and I can explain everything when you... actually, before I go, how far out are you and Gale?”
Something in Celestia’s face changed, and she swallowed. “I don’t follow, Morty. What is your plan?”
“Stop asking questions and just do what I say, or I’m going to die! I’m still fighting Wintershimmer, right now! How far out? Answer, then send me off! Got it?”
“I…” Celestia sighed. “About five minutes. I’m carrying her.”
“Damn… I’ll have to do this quickly.” I forwned, and then glared at her. “Well? Send me now!”
The goddesses horn flared, and the cloudy sky burst into heat.
Looking in from the outside, the Summer Lands was a strangely empty place. That’s easy to comprehend.
As a loose soul, dead, it’s a lot harder to describe because words like ‘empty’ and ‘space’ don’t make sense anymore. Fortunately, despite the absence of physical dimensions or Euclidean geometry, the one item of interest was immediately apparent. And thanks to the absence of those dimensions, that item of interest happened to be immediately nearby.
“You ripped out your own soul?” Wintershimmer asked, holding up Mortal Coil’s limp chin with a hoof. He was standing in the Summer Lands, right at the threshold of the portal through which I could look back into Everfree City and the land of the living. He turned his own head upward to look into the void of the Summer Lands; his gaze passed right through me, but lacking any physical presence, he didn’t know to stop. “It will only take me a seance to disperse you. You haven’t escaped me.”
I flooded into the limp body at his hooves. Possession was a strange sensation. I felt the gouge in Mortal Coil’s neck, but it didn’t feel like it was in my neck. The pain felt distant. The fatigue was strangely easy to ignore.
Without the pain of bruises and wounds and the fatigue of too many spells cast or the nausea of quicksilver in my veins, there was nothing stopping me from putting most of my body weight my hoof as I moved. I took that advantage to slam the limb straight into Wintershimmer’s jaw. It wasn’t a heavy blow; I still wasn’t a bulky stallion who favored his hooves in a fight. But at the end of the day, in that moment I had the weight of a healthy young body behind me (less some neck) and Wintershimmer was a stallion on the verge of his hundredth birthday.
The archmage stumbled backward over the threshold of the Summer Lands portal and back into the lecture hall in Everfree City. After rubbing a sleeve over his muzzle to wipe away the blood, he scowled. “You possessed your own body. You changed gravity just so your corpse would fall through the portal.”
“You always were good at deduction,” I answered, pacing at the lip of the portal. “But let’s go a little bit further. Now that I’m possessing my own body, it doesn’t matter if I pass out from using too much magic. My horn might be, as you put it, a failed experiment. But even though it flares, it does lend itself to brutal, overpowering spells.” I lit my horn, and cast a piercing beam of pure blue force toward Wintershimmer. He conjured up a golden shield, which barely held against the attack. I sustained my attack with a smile, and the old mage was forced to teleport out from behind his ward just before it broke.
I wasn’t about to give him a moment to rest, and the lack of dizzying drain from my spell made it easy to follow up with another. This time, I scattered my brilliant beams like lights refracted through a prism, hoping the scattered shots would catch Wintershimmer even when he dodged.
Wintershimmer slammed the floor in front of himself with a hoof as his horn glowed, and a wall of torn carpeting and wooden beams rose up to protect him. It was the same trick he’d used in Platinum’s Landing, and though I was willing to bet he’d teleported out, I didn’t know where to look.
Luckily, I didn’t have to find him myself. Magic surged through my horn, and at random, I hurled bolt after bolt of my blue mana into the broken benches and ravaged desks in the room.
“Well?” I asked the furniture, which was slowly beginning to stir. “Anything here see him?”
They were a pathetic excuse for golems; their forms weren’t really meant to move. Still, they were enough to get me the information I needed.
In a creaking wooden voice, like branches in the wind, one of the lecture seats spoke up. “Master, he’s right there.” With a somewhat painful shrug of an arm that wasn’t intended to move, the bench pointed at the mound Wintershimmer had raised up from the floor. “He’s casting something!”
“Really?” I leg my horn surged, and with telekinesis, blasted straight into the wooden wall Wintershimmer had made. In a surge of splinters and carpet, I saw my former mentor thrown clear to the far side of the room. A few long shards of wood cut into his jacket and drew blood from his gray coat. He would have hit the wall with enough force to break his back, I had to imagine. Instead, his horn lit, and a shimmering portal of gold appeared on the wall, letting him through without a fatal crash.
I watched the other half of the portal open overhead, and charged my horn for another spell to strike him when he arrived.
Wintershimmer acted first, catching his own fall in a golden glow of telekinesis. Where his momentum was arrested, the shards of the broken flooring weren’t. I was forced to turn my spell into a shield as the racing shards of wood flew into the Summer Lands portal and threatened to pierce my throat.
In his moment of freedom, Wintershimmer’s horn traced a circle in the air. I dropped my shield and hurled a spell at him, but he dodged by simply releasing his telekinesis and dropping to the floor of the lecture hall. I fired two more bolts at him before the floating golden circle stole my attention. It was glowing brighter and brighter with every passing second, and my eyesight was rapidly fighting to fight past the brilliant white.
“Master, he’s—” The croaking wooden voice was cut off with the sound of wood shattering, once, and then twice, and then dozens and dozens of times as Wintershimmer lashed out with some attack against my makeshift golems.
In that moment, I threw up a shield blind. My instinct was proven wise barely a second later when some magic of Wintershimmer’s working collided with the barrier.
“You might be able to keep casting past your limit, but your body is still getting drained.” Wintershimmer was visibly panting as he stood in one of the aisles of the lecture hall, facing me. “I only have to survive long enough… and the fatigue will turn to mana burn. Your organs will rot. You’ll kill yourself… Even with unlimited mana from the Summer Lands… you still have to take it through your body…”
I lowered my shield and fired a blast of pure disruptive mana—not even constructed into a spell—at the glowing glyph Wintershimmer had left in the air. In a passing moment, the light faded and we once more stood facing each other in the lecture hall, now full of a country plain of splinters and shattered desks.
“True,” I answered, and I sent another pulse of magic, this one much shorter, toward Wintershimmer. The tired archmage’s horn fizzled once before it lit, and he only barely teleported away in time to avoid the six-foot hole in the floor from my casual attack. “But I can’t help but feel that somehow something’s bothering you.” I took a few calm steps forward, stopping deliberately on the very threshold of the Summer Lands. “Are you afraid of me, Wintershimmer?”
“A wise mage is always afraid in a real duel,” he answered. He lashed out at me with two of his slashing golden arcs, both of which I batted away with a trivial shield.
“Oh, so this is a real duel now?” I offered him a dramatic bow, made somewhat exaggerated in its drama by the blood trailing from the slit in my fetlock. “I ought to be flattered, shouldn’t I?”
“Overconfidence is a fiend in the reeds waiting to devour us.” His horn lit, and I once more felt the illusion of pain sweep over my body. This time, however, I wasn’t terribly bound to that body, so I just let the magic carry on.
“Was that intended to incapacitate me?” I asked disdainfully.
“Not yet,” Wintershimmer answered, and his horn lit again.
I felt a strange warmth on the back of my neck, far closer than the more distant feelings of my physical body. It took me a split second to realize what was happening, and a frankly inelegant surge of flailing magic to stop Wintershimmer’s attack. But then, it wasn’t really an attack.
“A binding?”
He said nothing, but that was its own answer. Wintershimmer had been trying to bind me to my body. If I was forced to lose the separation between my soul and its consciousness, I would pass out instantly and be easy prey for the vengeful archmage. I also noted to myself, quietly, that there was an awful lot of blood on the back of my neck. I didn’t have long to beat Wintershimmer if I was hoping to actually get back into my body again once I was done.
I reached out magically at Wintershimmer again, and rather than fire a blast of raw magic, I felt the spell with which he had guarded his soul from the Razor. Breaking it would be easy enough, with all my mana to spare.
Before I could find it, I saw a cloud of purple mist sweeping across the lecture hall toward the podium. Miasma’s Toxin was just as familiar as it had been when we fought in the Union. Before my eyes, the purple gas swept over Solemn Vow’s icicle-laden corpse. Pustules formed across his coat and horn, swelling up as the gas bloated his blood vessels, then collapsing into cracked, sunken abscesses. Swallowing, I pulled up as much mana as I could get into my horn at once and cast a spherical bubble of a shield around the portal, the Summer Lands, and my own still very-much vulnerable body.
Outside, Wintershimmer sat down comfortably on one of the remaining intact benches, just behind the mist. When he’d taken a seat, I hadn’t seen. He wasn’t really smiling the way anypony else would be described that way, but given his already skull-like features, a small upward twist of the lips gave quite a strong impression.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ve put yourself in a corner, Coil. You can’t cast out at it through me with your inelegant beams and bursts, because even a small hole for a second or two will let Miasma’s Gas in. Normally, you would teleport out, but you can’t leave the Summer Lands without binding yourself to your body, since nopony is seancing you.”
I frowned. “I don’t need those spells to defeat you.”
“Don’t you? Hoping to crush me to death with a bench, or some other spell that doesn’t need a line from your horn to me?” Wintershimmer slowly lit his horn, steepled his hooves, and waited.
I felt a warmth on my neck again, and this time I had more grace in fending the binding cantrip away. Nevertheless, I realized Wintershimmer’s strategy. His bindings were incredibly cheap to cast, and I couldn’t counter them without flaring my horn and surging more mana through my weakened body. If I just sat there fending him off, he would win.
In desperation, I did exactly as he proposed. The bench he was sitting on threw him up in the air, and Wintershimmer was forced to increase the magic in his horn substantially. I’d expected him to teleport, but instead he reoriented himself in midair and landed rather gracefully on the ceiling.
When I swung the bench at him, he leapt to the side, and my blow punched a hole in the roof that exposed the midday sky. I dropped the now broken bench and grabbed onto Wintershimmer’s neck directly, and he smiled as I snapped it in half.
It was obvious it had been to easy. “An illusion?” I whispered aloud. Then I glanced around the room until I found the bandolier Wintershimmer had ripped off my chest one surprisingly short lifetime ago. Teleporting it to me was trivial, and I quickly retrieved one of the purging gems. Smashing it against my chest ended the background surge of pain that I had been ignoring, and also changed the room around me. While the ceiling had still been smashed open, I hadn’t before seen Wintershimmer standing in the middle of one of the few remaining clearings in the aisles, tracing a complex arcane symbol with his hoof which remained glowing with his golden magic even after his hoof moved on.
“All the force in the world won’t make you cunning.” Wintershimmer shook his head. “Still, you’ve lasted longer than I expected. Stronger than I can easily best with my arcana. I admit, I’ve given you too little credit these past days. You’re a worthy—” His thoughts were stolen completely when one of the doors at the far side of the lecture hall flew open. Wintershimmer whirled in place, and then seemed to relax when a single young mare ran through the door.
“Morty! What the fuck are you doing?” Gale yelled, her formal ambassadorial dress stumbling her a bit as she struggled to run. Procellarum was strapped to her side, and rage distorted the velvet tone of her face.
“Gale!” I shouted. “Get out of here! This isn’t—”
Before I could finish, and well before she could reply, Wintershimmer’s horn ignited. I stifled the Razor before he could kill Gale, only to feel my body weaken at the knees and collapse forward at the very threshold of the Summer Lands.
“And finally, there is your limit,” he observed, glancing over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Gale, still charging at him. With his horn still lit, Wintershimmer grabbed her by the throat. “Perhaps a bit of motivation is what you need, Coil.”
“Let go of…” Gale’s words were strangled out of her. Her voice gave way not to loss of will, but gasping for breath.
Behind her, I saw a great movement at the doors to the room. Luna, Celestia, Graargh, and Silhouette—or more accurately, Angel in her body—slid to a stop at the sight of Wintershimmer holding Gale so threateningly.
“Coil’s lackeys. And the alicorns. Let me make this philosophical dilemma simpler for all of us.” Wintershimmer whirled to face me, rotating Gale as he did. “I can be in the Summer Lands faster than any of you can strike me. If anypony lights a horn or moves closer, I will kill the princess.”
Celestia’s face was the epitome of fury. Flames poured from her wings, and she took a single step forward.
“No! Stop!” I shook my head as fast as I could, shouting from across the room. “I’ll…” It was hard to admit it, if only for the struggle I found to force air into my lungs. “He’s won.”
Angel was the first to speak; it was odd to hear him in Silhouette’s voice. “What? Master Coil, you can’t be seriously—”
“I am,” I interrupted, and then when I opened my mouth again, words refused to come. “Angel, you deserve more respect than I ever gave you, and I’m sorry for that. Celestia, take care of him—”
“Graargh not let Morty die!” Graargh bellowed, scraping at the floor of the room with his claws. His voice seemed so tiny, so distant, in the form of a bear cub. He bounded forward two strides before Luna was able to lunge forward and tug him back.
“Thanks.” I nodded to Luna before I turned to the cub in question. “Graargh, you’ll still have family here. Even without me.”
“Not leave!”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say, but I had to grit my teeth to keep my voice from slipping. “Celestia, thank you for caring. I’m sorry about running off without any warning. But you know what to do.”
Celestia cocked a brow in confusion. Wintershimmer let out a small snort of derisive amusement at that.
“And Gale… It was great to know you.”
Through gritted teeth, she shook her head. “Forget me. Kill this fucking asshole. Do some crazy bullshit!”
“If I let him kill you, I wouldn’t be a hero.”
“Then fuck being a hero!”
I winced, and turned my attention away to the far side of the broken lecture hall. Staring at Graargh and Silhouette’s body, I forced a cocksure smile I absolutely did not feel. “One of you should build me a statue or something. And… Well, I guess goodbye.”
Mortal Coil’s horn lit and telekinetically adjusted the collar of his jacket. Then, taking a single step forward for momentum, his body fell, soulless, past the edge of the portal and collapsed at the threshold of the Summer Lands.
As promised, here I, Luna, must take over Morty’s story for his lack of consciousness.
“You fucking bastard!” Gale shouted as soon as Morty hit the ground. Her hooves waved in the air at Wintershimmer, though he held her too far away to strike him. “Why is Morty—” Gale’s demands were crushed from her lungs when Wintershimmer slammed her against a broken bench nearby, sneering.
“Silence, filly,” he snapped, keeping his eyes constantly on us. “Celestia, Luna, this is between us now. The colt is lost. He’ll bleed out in a minute at most. Worry about the filly; I know you both care about her life.” He glared at Gale briefly. “One of you will now leave with the golem and the lycanthrope. The other will will surrender her body and her magic to me. If either of you hesitate, light your horns, or take any other actions I perceive as a threat, I will take the princess and escape into the Summer Lands, and you will never catch us. You have thirty seconds.”
As Celestia and I exchanged a nervous glance, Gale pushed herself up from the wreckage of the room. Her horn sparked up for just a moment as she shouted at us “Let him kill me! Save Morty! Don’t give this bastard—”
Wintershimmer’s horn glowed suddenly, and the magic on Gale’s horn was stifled. “You are twenty years of education away from influencing Coil’s fate in any meaningful way, so I suggest you forget the colt. His care for you never extended beyond his desire to save the fairytale princess.” He pulled Gale back from the broken bench and dropped her on the floor in front of him, a solid three strides away. “Twenty seconds, ‘goddesses.’”
“Can you stop him from teleporting?” Celestia asked me, her voice hushed.
The words were likely lost to Wintershimmer, as Graargh roared and fought my grip, wanting to charge forward.
“I have killed Coil already, and if you attack me, bear, Gale will soon follow.”
As the mage threatened Graargh, I whispering back to my sister. “Most likely. But I won’t risk Gale’s life on that.”
Wintershimmer took two backwards steps, pushing his arthritic bulging knees up onto the platform beside Coil. At that distance, he might very well just fling himself through the portal if we acted. “Ten seconds.”
Gale gasped at Wintershimmer as he dragged her closer, spitting up a bit of blood in the process. “You’re going to pay for Morty, bastard.”
“You are a poor listener, filly,” Wintershimmer answered, lighting his horn more potently. “I expect you all to be out of the room in the five seconds you have remaining.”
Celestia extended a wing toward us, gesturing backwards. “All of you, back. Please.”
“Celestia?” I asked. “You aren’t going to—”
“I will not let him hurt Gale,” she answered, walking slowly forward. “All of you, go.”
Gale tugged at Wintershimmer’s grip, even lighting her horn, but an untrained mage stood no chance against the wicked archmage. When she struggled in his grip, his magic clenched down on her windpipe. “Your part in this story is leverage. Nothing more.”
Gale fumbled, and then fell to the ground beside Wintershimmer. He seemed surprised when her horn ignited in a vibrant magenta glow. The aging archmage lifted the crown princess by her throat from the floor, squashing out the magic once again.
“Luna, you will close the door behind you,” Wintershimmer ordered. “Celestia, this will not hurt, but if you hestitate, the filly dies.”
I swallowed, reaching out a hoof for the doorknob as Wintershimmer dropped Gale a few dozen feet away and turned his magic on my sister. But before I could touch it, a flash on the stage stole my attention.
Gasping for breath, Gale had reached out a hoof toward Coil’s bandolier of gemstones. When Wintershimmer saw, he tugged the fabric away from her grip. In that moment, that brief second of opening, Gale lit her horn so quickly it flared, as Coil’s did with his every spell.
And she vanished, with a crack like thunder.
“What?” Wintershimmer demanded. “What trick—?”
The next sound anypony heard was the hiss of steel cleaving the air. Gale landed on the stage beside Wintershimmer as blood trickled down his face. Yellow eyes swiveled up, going cross eyed as they locked onto the bleeding stump on his brow where, moments before, a horn had been.
Gale panted, then donned a slight grin. “Morty… was… right.” She punctuated the thought by slamming a hoof into the side of Wintershimmer’s head, bowling him over with a painful smack of flesh on wood.
“You can’t… you can’t teleport!” Wintershimmer hissed, once he’d recovered from the pain enough to speak. The sound of his voice was still tainted in a pained moan, though. “Coil begged me to teach you, and—”
“That’s what he was right about, motherfucker.” Before the ninety-seven year old stallion could return to his hooves, Gale drove another hoof up into his chin. Wintershimmer crumpled at the blow, his limbs going slack. “I can’t believe his fucking plan worked.”
“Plan?” Celestia asked, rushing roward. After a moment of shock, I followed, along with Graargh and the crystal mare.
When we got closer, we could see the tears on Gale’s face. They were hidden well from a distance, by the wrinkles she wore in the strength of her furious scowl. Before Celestia could stop her, Gale slammed a hoof down on the stump of Wintershimmer’s horn, causing the old crippled stallion to let out a hoarse scream of agony. “How’s that feel, you fucking—!”
“Stop it!” Celestia ordered. “Gale, that’s enough!”
Gale stomped on the broken stallion’s chest twice before her hoof caught in the air. “He can fucking take it!”
Bright magic flowed from Celestia’s horn, holding her limb still. “This isn’t right, Gale. It won’t help Morty.”
“Of course not! He’s fucking dead!” Gale fought against Celestia’s magic, shuddering. “Let go of me! I’m gonna beat this asshole to death!”
“Gale, stop!” This time, it wasn’t Celestia yelling, but Graargh. He wrapped his legs around her waist and buried his face in the fabric of her ambassadorial outfit. “We help Morty!”
“Graargh,” Gale’s words came somewhere between a tired gasp and a pained shout. “We can’t…”
“We absolutely can!” Angel interrupted in Silhouette’s voice. “Master Coil has proven himself more than able to survive these… escapades. And now we have two alicorns to help us.”
Celestia shook her head. “We can heal wounds, Angel, but we cannot raise the dead.”
I coughed heavily.
Celestia shot me a glare. “Luna, you know what she means. He’s done nothing worth your condemnation.”
“What’s she talking about?” Gale asked. “Aunt Luna, can you heal him?”
Graargh was less question, uncaring of my methods. “You fix Morty, Moon Pony!”
I sighed. “I cannot give him life, changeling. What I would give him would be no more life that you saw in Solemn Vow in our battle. Certainly his body would be more… acceptable. But there are costs.”
“You’d make him undead?” Angel asked, his stiff diction fighting the crystal mare’s voice. “Master Coil always warned that he never liked the thought of making a corpse walk. He complained about the smell, to say nothing of the need to eat pony meat, like a pegasus.”
“Who gives a fuck?” Gale asked. “At least he’d fucking be here!”
What followed was a bitter groan from the floor. I’d thought Wintershimmer had passed out from the blood loss of his horn and the brutal beating he took from Gale, but his eyes focused on me from the floor.
“If you even open your fucking mouth,” Gale shouted, leaving the threat unfinished in the air.
Wintershimmer raised a hoof, stained with the blood running from Morty’s side and his own face, and held it in the air for a moment. It fell slowly before he could complete whatever motion he wanted.
“Let him be,” Celestia ordered, whether to Wintershimmer to Gale I cannot say. “Luna, whatever we do, we shouldn’t have this discussion now. And not here. Gale, Graargh, and Angel don’t need to stay here any longer.”
“Not leave Morty!” Graargh protested. “You fix!”
I sighed, then shook my head. “If we even can fix him, time won’t change it, Graargh. Please, follow me.”
Wintershimmer groaned and lifted a hoof again. Again, it fell slowly “...raise Coil,” the necromancer groaned.
“His name is Morty.”
Wintershimmer gasped once more when Gale’s horn lit, and a single stunning bolt slammed into his chest. His yellow eyes rolled back into his head, and the only motion left in his form was his wheezing breath as his chest rose and fell, and the steady trickle of blood from the stump of his horn.
It trickled, rich and red, along the stage until it met another, slower river of crimson that dribbled from the deep wounds on Coil’s body.
And then for just a moment, it seemed all was still.
“Gale,” Celestia whispered, iron in her voice despite its quiet. “Please go with Luna. I will… clean up.”
Gale stared at where Wintershimmer and Morty lay. For a very long time, her legs were stock still.
Then she shook her head. “I said I needed more time…” And, slowly, she stretched out a hoof to where Wintershimmer’s limb had lifted twice off the floor.
Hanging in the air, descending slower than honey stretching from a spoon, Gale’s hoof met a drop of blood that ought to have long since hit the ground.
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“Overconfidence is a fiend in the reeds waiting to devour us.”
Silly old wintershimmer, Thats not how you are supposed to say it, THIS, is how you say it.
... I did not see the end of the chapter coming.
8931668
Get.
Rekt.
You old bastard.
I wonder how Morty is going to go from dead and possibly about to be turned into a ghoul, and into some sort of immortal that won't damage his soul.
8932043
Called it!
Now is not the time to mourn, Celestia!
Forcing Wintershimmer to defend himself in the real world while Morty uses his strategy of the infinite mana in the Summer Lands seems like a winning strategy. Or at least a good delaying tactic.
Well, maybe.
Nice!
Looks like Wintershimmer was wrong about Gale’s part being just leverage.
One final trick?
Rereading this, and YSK the chapter image is broken here.
10408046
That should be fixed (though it might be bigger than it used to be?) Thanks for bringing it up to me.