Act 3 Chapter 66 : Open Sesame
"It is not hubris to wield power. It is hubris to believe oneself infallible simply because power is wielded. A mountain can fall into the ocean. An ocean can boil in a volcano. All can be crushed under the weight of time or a lever in precisely the right place."
-Princess Celestia, Will To Pony
We boiled in the heart of a star.
Every follicle of hair on our body had become a nerve tuned only to pain. A thousand times we were flensed, flayed, and shattered. The winds buffeted us and seconds stretched to centuries.
We sat in the leading edge of a hurricane, under the curling edge of a tsunami, on the shaking floor of a quaking valley, beneath a meteor’s raging glow. We sat, listened, and waited, with all the patience of a stone while a mighty voice battered the doors of our psyche.
The endless tide of noise raked its way up and down the inside of our skull. A horde of berserk thoughts trampled through our mind, eating, raping, bleeding, screaming, and dying.
Throughout it all, a tiny mote of self refused to be snuffed.
“Scream all you like,” it whispered.
We clung to that mote. It refused to leave us and kept by our side, a comforting friend to hold against the howling of condemned innocents. Flesh and bone might fail, but let them fail.
We had our tiny light.
“You may shriek, but it is only a wave upon my endless shore.”
The blood in our veins crackled with magic as the spell connected us, giving form and function that we had lost when the grinding reduced us to a slurry. Were these our veins? They could not be. Those were powdered and given a shape.
“I existed before the beginning of time, and I will exist again.”
When had we all passed? Why was there nothing beyond the moment of passing? What happened? Where were our talents? Were they as one?
No, they could not be. This one had one talent.
The bell cracked.
Our muscles ached, but the noise was beginning to fade. The one who’d given us form was still there, awaiting, like a timeless sentinel, wrapped in a bubble of that which we craved most. We’d surged upon him and he gifted us with that wonder.
‘I am the silence at the end of the universe.’
----
My eyes snapped open as I hovered above the focus.
My eyes? Yes? No? All of our eyes. The eyes of thousands, watching.
We watched the ancient white mare standing on the other side of the focus. Her flesh was riddled with machines, but they were unlike those that ground us to dust.
I swallowed, trying to regain some semblance of self as I shook off the thought. My horn was aflame, letting off wave after wave of energy yanked out of the air itself. My own reserves were empty, but still my horn continued to cast. Beside her, the hated monster stood. We wanted nothing more than to scour him from existence itself for what he’d denied us, but this one...this one had already taken a perfect revenge. He was as trapped as we.
“M-Mister Limerence?” Belle stuttered.
I opened my muzzle to reply, but the sound that issued from my mouth almost knocked Ancestor Belle off her legs. It was a sonic crack which had both her and my brother instinctively throwing their hooves over their ears. A little trickle of blood ran down the corner of my muzzle.
‘We shook some of his teeth loose.’
‘His tongue is bleeding.’
‘No, we mustn’t!’
‘He is our only way out!’
‘I want my daddy!’
‘I can’t abide this any longer!’
‘Boiling flesh, eyes, needles, cat scratch, murder, rotten sluts in gutters.’
Silence.
Our...my...talent wrapped itself around us, clenching the noise like a fist around a throat. I could feel their momentary panic as they discovered my spell robbing them of their voices. So many voices. I cast my silence amongst them and it was a flood through a burning house.
Slowly, cautiously, I let the spell fade.
“Now, then,” I said, in a voice that was still loud enough to shake the building. Ancestor Belle sat below me with her hooves clamped over her ears and Zefu cowered against the opposite side of the altar, his magical body jittering like a thousand nervous fireflies.
“B-brother?” he asked.
I opened my mouth, but something else beat me to my vocal chords.
“Quiet worm! For peeling your eyes and yanking your—”
My silence clamped down again, cutting off the tirade. I drew a deep breath, and hundreds shuddered in agony and pleasure at the sensation. My flesh ached, but the spell held.
“Are you alright, Mister Tome?” Ancestor Belle asked.
I had to muffle a laugh that would surely have threatened to kill her and inconvenience all of us to no end. The sounds of weapons fire and fighting from outside the building were getting close. At a greater distance, they’d been joined by more sounds of violence: screams, shouts, explosions, spells, and the snapping beat of giant wings.
“We...are...complicated,” I murmured. The overwhelming pressure of the trapped souls’ thoughts was still making it difficult to assemble my own cogitations, but without actually being able to hear their wailing it was a little easier to manage.
“Limerence, on a scale of one to ten, how possessed are you?” Zefu asked, raising himself from behind the altar.
I looked down at my hooves which still dangled a meter off the floor.
“Extremely,” I replied, then held up a leg to forestall any more questions.
Turning my attention inward, I tried to sort the vast waves of different feelings running circles around my brain. Zefu’s spell seemed to have hollowed out a neat hole in my mindscape into which the vast, teeming throng of mashed together souls had poured the instant our connection was established. They were terrified, both that I’d come and that I’d leave them to their previous conditions.
Many seemed mad beyond saving; those were reduced to blubbering, psychic sludge that manifested as a constant droning buzz of misery. Even more were catatonic, having crawled down within whatever fantasy-scapes they could muster to escape the horror of what’d become of them. Most of that lot appeared bizarrely content. They were little more than floating sacks of gentled numbness. A few variations existed, clumping here or there within formless space. Contradictory as it might sound, the voluminous space did, on second examination, seem to have a mass and geometry.
I wandered in the field of unhinged emotions and thoughts, listening to them as best I could. Here, a mare cried in a meadow full of flowers over her husband who’d died just a few weeks ago in the war. There, a child walked home from school down back alleys he’d taken a hundred times and thought he knew, end to end. An old stallion looked forward to seeing his dog again in the afterlife.
They floated by in their thousands, many unable to comprehend what viciousness had befallen them until at last I came to a place where quiet reigned.
Therein lay only a few dozen souls, but they seemed to be more stable than those around them.
It would be inaccurate to say I ‘moved’ toward them; they were inside my mind and I could no more move toward a single point in my own brain than I could point to a single drop of water in an ocean. Still, there was a sensation of motion and of attention closing in. As one, they became aware of me.
I’d no idea how the magical bubble of quiet that seemed to swell and throb with my own heartbeat was keeping voices inside my skull from overwhelming me, so it seemed there was no reason I could not try to will it into a particular shape. My talent obeyed with a whimsical flourish, billowing outward away from the tiny group of souls as they dangled like shining embers huddling together to keep their remaining warmth in the high winds of the maddened collective.
‘He sees us...Oh! We can talk again! That enchantment of his is pretty dynamite. It’s ever so much quieter in here.’
‘Do you think he can hear what we say?’
‘Do you want to ask him? I read some of his thoughts. He’s a very dangerous pony.’
‘He’s just a colt who has been in some very dangerous situations. I knew his father. Tome was a good sort. So is he.’
‘Good sort or not, we can’t let this chance walk away, can we?’
‘No, of course you’re right.’
Opening my eyes, I said aloud and in the softest voice I could manage with all those rampant energies ripping at my body, “Zefu. There are some people in here who have not lost their minds. How do I communicate with them?”
“If you cast the spell correctly, I’m pretty sure you just did, brother,” Zefu replied.
‘He is right. We can hear you. You can understand us?’
For some reason this voice seemed to be that of a middle-aged stallion. As he spoke, a picture faded into being behind my eyes of an earth pony with a dark blue coat and wispy, thinning mane holding a pipe in the corner of his mouth. He looked down at himself and smiled, before pulling the pipe from his lips with one hoof and tapping it out on the other.
“I can see you,” I thought in what amounted to the stallion’s direction.
He winced, as though I’d yelled at him.
“Not so loud, buddy. I might not have ears anymore, but after six months of being shouted or cried at by the crazies, I’m enjoying the peace.”
“My apologies,” I thought, trying to modulate how much attention I sent his way.
“That’s better. Can you see the others? I didn’t have a body until a minute ago and I’m sure they’d enjoy it.”
I focused on the remaining stable souls and, one by one, they began to resolve into individual shapes before becoming what amounted to a crowd standing or flying in the strange plane within my mental landscape. Their forms were myriad: a few griffins, some zebras, plenty of ponies, and one or two other species. There was even a hippogriff, toward the back.
They went about inspecting themselves, cheerfully clapping their hooves or stomping their claws before beginning to peer at one another.
“Glisten? I thought you were a pony!”
“I told you I had claws! I must have!”
“Tender! Oh Tender, I had no idea you were so beautiful!”
“Hush Puppy, are you over there?”
“I’m here, Cosma! I’m over here! My goodness, you’re tall!”
Before the rush of feelings could drive me to distraction, the stallion I’d first met raised his forelegs into the air and called out to them.
“Everyone! Mister Tome here needs our attention! Please, hold your excitement!”
Turning back in what I may as well call my direction, the stallion puffed casually at his pipe.
“I’m Caliente! I can’t tell you how pleased we all are to meet you!”
Visualizing myself a body, I felt it take shape, then slowly dropped onto something that felt entirely too real to be some minor element of my mind. The strange dichotomy of still feeling my actual body and having sensations coming from a mental projection was nauseating, but throwing up while possessed is almost never a good idea, so I swallowed my gorge and gave the assembled crowd of persons a slight bow.
“I am afraid you all have me at a disadvantage,” I said, “I expected to find no sane ponies. I was hoping I might direct the emotional sentiment of this place towards my ends, but...are...are you all aware of what happened to you?”
There was a general shuffling of hooves and claws before a young, lavender mare with a tightly wound bonnet and a teddy bear sitting on her back stepped forward.
“Most of us were poisoned, or kidnapped and poisoned. Our bones were milled and we were thrown into ash pits full of other ponies’ remains. Caliente found us before we could go insane. He was here a long time ago.”
I flicked my attention toward Caliente once more. “How is this possible?”
“I was one of the first,” he answered, rubbing his wrinkled forehead. “It didn’t used to be so loud out there, but you learn to tune it out. Leastways, I did. When I could, I’d find the young ones, freshly dead, freshly poisoned, and pull them here with me.”
“But how have you kept from going insane?”
A small griffin with a thick head of red feathers that made him look like a lit match trotted out of the herd. “We tell stories. We talk to each other. Caliente taught us to keep ourselves together. Keep from letting the madness come in.” His eyes dropped and he scuffed at one claw with the other. “There used to be more of us.”
Outside, my brother had gotten up and moved over to my side. He was waving a glowing leg in front of my face and saying something I couldn’t make out.
“Now there a zony I like to stomp to bloody pulp,” a yak toward the back murmured. “Makes me mad someone beat us to it, but don’t think yak could have stomped him better than you.”
Several voices were raised in agreement.
I shook my head at Zefu, at which he took a step back, before returning my attention to the people inside my mind.
“My brother killed you?” I asked.
“Not I, but he killed a few,” Caliente replied, his lip curling into a snarl. “His master worked for the rotters who put us here. Nasty old zebra whose name we never did get. If I ever get to the afterlife, I’m going to look him up. There will be a line to kick him in the bollocks, and I might go twice.”
The young griffin let out a soft hiss and glared up at the sky. “Your brother refined his magic. Made it more...efficient. I want to rip him into shreds with my beak. That gutless shit didn’t even kill me properly. He poisoned my dinner, and I paid handsomely for that pig! I don’t suppose you could stick him in here with us, could you?”
“Unfortunately, no,” I replied, shaking my head. “For now, I need him. If he annoys me, do believe I will consider it. Right now, I need your assistance.”
The mare with the teddy bear looked back and forth between herself, Caliente, and the assembled crowd of souls. “We were hoping you could get us out of here. What are we supposed to do? Most of us aren’t even part of the same building.”
My attention was yanked away for a moment as Zeta charged back into the pylon’s inner chamber, followed by a spray of bullets that spattered the floor a second after she’d pressed herself against the wall. A second later, Hard Boiled Senior trotted in with a casual air, a lit cigarette clenched between his teeth. He was so coated in blood it actually took me a second to recognize him and his sports jacket had a few fresh bullet holes in it, but he seemed none the worse for wear.
Looking up at where I floated, the skeleton quickly stubbed out his cigarette before tucking it behind one ear. “I see things aren’t any less exciting in here, then. Looks like you’ve got some friends in your head there, kiddo. I can hear them whispering when I speak to you. Funny thing, that.”
“There are more than a few,” I said, shuddering as the shrieking voices battered against the wall of silence surrounding my weirdly segmented mind. “What is going on outside?”
“Our friends have started their run on the P.A.C.T. building by now if my watch is right, but we’re about to have a fight in here. There’s a full squad of uglies Miss Zeta and I didn’t manage to clean off before the rest broke off to defend their headquarters. They’re playing it smart and keeping out of range, but that’ll only last till they get their heavy hitters.”
As if on cue, a smoke grenade arced in over his shoulder. He casually caught it in midair, turned, and whipped it back the way it’d come. I had only a second to plug my ears with my hooves before the explosion shook the air and more shouts were heard from outside.
“I need more time!” I barked, for a second forgetting to modulate my voice. Zeta all but collapsed against the wall, tears streaking her face as she shot me an angry glare. A tickle on my upper lip told me I’d probably also broken a few capillaries in my nose. “P-pardon. I need a few more minutes. I found some people who might help us.”
“Then don’t waste your time with us! We die, it’s irrelevant. This is all for nothing if you don’t finish the job!”
“Is he like us?” Caliente asked from inside my head.
I pulled my thoughts away from my physical body and returned to my mindscape.
“He is. Listen, I think...given time, we can free all of you, but I can’t do it today. There are events going on out in the world that are beyond my control, and I am in considerable danger. If we survive, I swear I will let someone know you are here. Princess Celestia will know.”
There was a general murmur of discontent from the herd, but Caliente raised his voice above them, pulling his pipe out and raising it high.
“Listen to me! We were alone! We have survived for years because we were together, and we can survive years more, if we must! Do you all understand? This stallion offers us hope! Hope for getting free!”
The emotions of the crowd washed through my mind, shaking my self-control: sadness, relief, joy, anger, fear, suspicion, comfort. It was more at once than I’d ever felt. More than anything, I wanted to push them back into silence, but it wasn’t an option. Not yet. Not until I’d done my duty.
My brother tarnished our family name by enslaving those ponies.
‘I will make it right.’
As that thought crystallized, the entire group stopped and turned toward me. Their faces reflected that same mixture of emotions, but leaned more heavily toward hope. A towering male zebra wearing twenty gold rings around each leg stomped through the crowd, poking his head out to give me a close, critical inspection.
“Caliente says we trust him. His mind is open to us. That is good enough for Zatanga, of Clan Rat Stomper.”
“And Gildana, of Clan Tokan,” a musclebound griffin toward the back added. “I see pictures of my family in his mind. He knows them. His soul is good.”
Gradually, the wild ebbing and flowing of feelings calmed until all I felt from them was determination and attention. Caliente smiled at the group and returned his attention to me, sticking his pipe back in his mouth and settling down on his haunches. He seemed to take considerable pleasure in being able to sit down, though if I had been without flanks for an extended period I suppose I would as well.
“Mister Tome, I was a maker of fine tobacco. I expected to die of lung cancer, with my head held high, because I love to smoke. I lived through the return of Luna and some of the brightest days Equestria has ever seen. My lungs held strong. Instead, I died in a nursing home when the old necromancer came to my bedside claiming to be a doctor with a ‘new medicine’. I died and he stole my bones.”
Reaching out, he pressed his hoof against my chest. It might have been a psychosomatic response, but I swear I could feel its weight in the real world.
“Everyone here has some similar story. We were taken before our time and trapped in this half-existence, ground to dust and with only each other for comfort. We have waited, hoping someone would one day figure out that we were here. Now...you have come. If what is in your mind is true, then everyone who lives is in danger. Our loved ones in the world outside are in danger.”
It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t saying any of this for my benefit. The collection of species behind him were looking to one another. A few nodded their heads, and more were exchanging murmurs and quiet looks.
“We could ask you a thousand, thousand questions, but no answers would make what has been done to us right. Only you can do that...and you must have needed something when you came here. We can hear most of your thoughts, but...they are not all clear. What is it you need from us?”
I started to reply, when my attention was torn back to the real world by a screech of rage as a massive, barreling monstrosity crashed through the door of the focus chamber.
The creature was only loosely equine, insofar as it had four legs, hooves, and a head. Scraps of broken, bleeding orange-furred flesh were stretched dangerously over vast, tumorous muscles. Though I still floated more than a meter off the ground, the beast was right up to my chest height.
Its skull was misshapen, as though somepony had hit it in the face with a shovel until it flattened out. When it opened its warped muzzle to hiss like a whole pit of angry snakes, a giant array of twisted teeth shimmered in the light thrown off by my horn.
Pausing just inside the chamber, it glanced left, then right, before spotting me with its beady little eyes. Though couched in a face which seemed part bovine, part wolf, its eyes were still a pony’s eyes. They were full of rage, but also a mortal fear. As we stared at each other, time seemed to stretch out.
‘It’s going to kill me,’ I thought.
Suddenly, a shining light leapt between us. My brother’s projection stood there, glaring up at the creature.
“If anyone is to kill Limerence, it will be me! Now get back, beast!” he snarled.
The monster recentered its gaze on Zefu and lowed at him. It pawed the ground once, lowered its head, and then leapt forward. My brother jumped to the side, rolling in a convincing manner though his hooves did sink a few inches into the concrete surface.
Ancestor Belle seemed to appear out of thin air, inches from the end of the creature’s nose. It snorted, angrily, only to let out a surprised squeak as she grabbed it by the forehead and drove her horn squarely into one of its eyes. There was a loud snap, followed by a pop and the beast went limp, its mighty bulk collapsing where it stood.
Carefully, the elderly mare pulled her horn from the beast’s empty eye socket. Her horn kept coming until she had to step back a couple of feet to let it free. It’d grown a solid eighteen centimeters, but quickly shrank back onto her forehead with a faint crackle of energy.
Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and gave the dead mutation a light kick.
“You kept that modification, but wouldn’t take the armored knees?” he asked.
“I never ruined my original knees jumping off dragons like Scootaloo. Are there more coming?”
Zeta darted to the door and stuck her head out for a half second before yanking it back as a blast of shotgun pellets answered her appearance.
“Many!” she shouted.
“Form up! They won’t want to use anti-magic grenades inside a pylon, but we have to keep them off of Limerence!”
My body glowed before a thick bubble of energy wrapped itself around my limbs, binding them up against my chest. I squirmed a little, but was quite immobile.
“Stop trying to move!” Belle barked. “That will keep you safe, but not if you wiggle too much!”
“Must it be so small?!” I called back.
“The quicker you talk to your friends in there, the quicker you can get out!”
Before I could formulate an answer, a half dozen of the smaller creatures burst in like a wave of ravening locusts, beating their ragged, badly kempt wings as they zipped about with guns blazing. Sparks glanced off my magical prison where bullets had impacted, but it held. Most of the berserk abominations were still largely ponylike, though their faces were morphed by overgrown teeth. Several wore black P.A.C.T. barding, but it appeared torn and unpolished, like it’d just happened to be the last thing on their bodies before their mutations.
One of the creatures—a mare with two gigantic tusks sticking out of her jaw that coiled up to her ears—lunged at me with a chattering semi-automatic pistol in her teeth, only to be caught midair by Hard Boiled Senior who drove his tiny knife into her forehead. I expected a short jerk as the blade stopped, but it kept moving, all but flaying the creature from skull to tail and splashing my shield with blood.
Behind them, Zeta was riding another armored beast into the ground, using a loop of paracord she must have taken off of one of them to knot its throat shut.
“Limerence Tome,” Caliente whispered, and I swallowed, trying to force my mind back into the calmer space within.
Somehow, my silence spell still held most of the maddened souls at bay within my thought-space. The enchantment was shaky, but it called on far less of my depleted magical reserves to use my talent than to cast any other given spell.
“I’m here! I’m here!” I called back as the middle-aged stallion reappeared with his followers in my mind’s eye.
“It looks an awful lot like you’re about to be eaten alive,” he said, jerking his chin in a direction over my shoulder.
“That’s one way to put it, yes,” I replied, willing my body back into existence within the dark mental plane. “How much do you know about what happened to your bodies?”
“We know we are in Shield pylons,” a stiffly prim mare in a starched dress and pants suit that was twenty years out of date answered from a place a few heads back from the front. “Some of us were taken to a specific pylon before we died. Filthy things. Usually they would force us to hold some specific image in our heads. I remember having to imagine this nasty criminal dodging an assassin. I wanted nothing more than to see him...well, I shan’t say, but they said they would hurt my kitties if I didn’t do exactly as they said.”
I winced as a body bounced off the shield around me, but forced my eyes shut again, doing my best to hold the mental landscape together.
“That...that must be how they made their wishes before they had the armor of Nightmare Moon. A wasteful procedure. That does mean that you must have some direction over the pylons themselves.”
Caliente’s lip curled and he spat off to one side. “I suppose we might, but it’s not enough to get out of here. Until you, we couldn’t even see what was going on outside. The operator sometimes leaked a few thoughts, but we can’t talk to them. Ignoring the crazies is a full time job, too.”
I hesitated for a second as a thought started to form in my mind.
“If...if I asked you to...to hold an image in your minds right now...could you do it?”
Caliente hesitated, then blew a long, thin stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth as he turned to look at the crowd behind him. “You think we could? I mean, it gets awful loud in here without Mister Limerence’s silence spell.”
“How would we know if we were holding the right image?” a colt asked, leaning against a much larger mare. “They stuck the pictures in our minds the first time with magic and stuff.”
“If they had but one individual to direct, they would need extreme specificity to develop a stable magical form, but with a plethora, systemic chaotic factors could cancel each other out—”
“Mister Limerence,” Caliente cut into my thoughts, gesturing at me with one hoof. “We can hear your brain churning, but I doubt anypony here has a degree in advanced arcanery. I want to see my wife in the next life, and we have waited for years. Some of us have waited decades. Anything we can do that will end this torment, we will try. So lay it out simple and short.”
For a long moment, I sat in silence, trying to think of what to say. I could not imagine what they’d been through. I doubted anyone could.
A thud shook me from my contemplations as a body slowly dropped off the shield around me and slid to the ground in a pool of blood. I stared at the creature’s dead face for a second before snapping my eyes shut once more.
‘Focus. Focus or we all die.’
“I...I need all of you to imagine myself not exploding.”
There were a few seconds where no one said anything before the yak toward the back piped up. “Yak think he hearing not good, ‘cept not have ears anymore. You say you want we think you not blow up?”
I nodded. “All of you must, together, picture that I do not die or combust for the next few minutes. I’m going to tap into the crystal down there and...I need you to keep me from turning to ash or detonating or losing all my skin or any other terribly unpleasant thing. Just imagine me as I am. Whole. Alive. Uninjured.”
Caliente puffed thoughtfully on his pipe for a minute as the various creatures behind him exchanged some confused looks.
“That all?” he asked. “You’ve got a fresh as daisies memory in your head of a burning pony. I’m assuming you don’t want to end up like that?”
“What if we don’t all picture you the same kind of okay?” a tiny filly with a curly blond mane asked, before ducking back behind the legs of a stallion who might have been her father.
“It...it may be enough for you all just to imagine me as I am right now; Unchanged, uninjured. If you can send the image out amongst the poor damaged ones outside and have them focus as well, it may help. If enough are concentrating on the same general concept of an undamaged...me...then there should be enough overlap to grant me some protection.”
“And if that isn’t enough?” Caliente asked.
“Then I die, but I will do my best to stand” I whispered, aloud, before opening my eyes on a scene of carnage.
It took me a moment to even recognize my companions. All three of them were painted in layers of red, but around them lay the bodies of a dozen dead creatures in various states of extreme disrepair. One was broken in half, while another had been neatly bisected from jaw to tail as though it’d run face first into a bandsaw blade.
Ancestor Belle sat in the half-light of a burning corpse, lit by blue flames that licked away its flesh. She was applying a wide bandage to Zeta’s rear leg as the zebress let out soft whimpers of discomfort. Behind her, my brother’s projection sat watching the fires burn, seemingly unsure what to do with himself. Hard Boiled Senior was keeping watch at my hooves, just standing there staring up at me like death on vigil.
“Ah! You come out of it, finally?” he asked.
“How long was I in congress with them?”
“Don’t know. I got blood in my watch. Call it ten minutes. There are more bastards coming and I heard something that might have been a dragon not long ago, but it was making some right unhappy noises.”
“At least it’s not an entire army,” Ancestor Belle interjected. “Officer Swift and Miss Taxi seem to be holding up their end of the fight, or we’d be facing more badness.”
Giving my horn a quick shake in as little of the confined space within Miss Belle’s shield as I had to move, I let the necromantic communication spell fade. Within my mind, all the voices of the untold numbers of souls vanished. My horn hurt like mad, though not nearly as badly as I thought for sure it would after such a powerful spell; the amount of psychic energy running through that incantation was enough to dangle me several bodylengths in the air.
“You can let me down,” I said, bracing for a drop. Ancestor Belle looped her horn in a little circle and I was carefully lowered to the ground, stretching my legs one by one. “Better! Brother, I believe I have come to an accord with your victims. Tell me...these ‘wishes’ this system grants. Would I be correct in saying you usually require a sacrifice to help adjust the spellform?”
Zefu stared into the distance for a second before slowly lifting his head. “W-what did you say, brother?” he asked, though it was still Miss Belle’s mouth that moved. She shot me a ‘hurry it up’ look and pointed at her muzzle with the tip of her hoof.
“The spell form which makes the wishes? Does it require a sacrifice to adjust? A trapped mind?”
Rising, he shook himself, tossing his mane over one shoulder. “Ahem. Yes. A sacrifice. Yes. To make the Family’s ‘payments’ to various entities required a sacrifice. Usually an unattended pony would do. The homeless worked quite well. Brother, may I ask you a question?”
I shook my head, looking past him to my other companions. “We’ve little time for it and I didn’t bring you here to ask me questions or have a crisis of what I know to be a near complete lack of conscience.”
“One question, then I will return to the sword until this is over, when we can discuss...payment for my services, today.”
Throwing my forelegs in the air I snapped, “Zefu, it is the end of the world! What part of that do you not understand?”
“Only my place in it.” His expression became pensive as he flashed a quick glance at where Zeta stood. She seemed wholly focused on the pain in her injured leg, save for one ear which was cocked in our direction. “My world has already ended, so far as I can tell. I believed I had a destiny, but...I’d no luxury of a talent, like ponies have. I am a zony and not enough unicorn to warrant such an honor. It’s left me curious. If our positions were reversed...when would you have known you were on a path to defeat?”
I breathed out a sharp snort. “The moment, precisely?”
“Yes.”
I trotted over and picked up the swordstaff from where it lay, bringing it back to sit in front of him.
“Sometime well before I committed to my own father’s death as a means of self-advancement,” I replied.
“Ah. I suppose...that is what makes us different,” he said, musingly. Plucking at his lower lip in a way he’d done a thousand times in life when confronted by a unique puzzle, he waved a hoof toward my chest. “I asked myself if I was doing the right thing only after I stood over his body. Live and learn. Or die and learn, in my case.”
I nodded. “It does help to keep in mind that there will come a day, whether you are given a body or not, when you will die entirely, Zefu. Father will have words on the advantages of forethought. Meanwhile? Back in the sword. I have work to do.”
Zefu shrugged as the lights comprising his vaporous body began to shift and fade. “I look forward to finding a body. It would be nice to take a crap, again. I failed to do that before our battle in the elder dimension. Who knows? I might have won had I not been focused on the roasted vegetable platter I had the morning before.”
With that, he vanished, and my sword let off a faint glow. Snatching it up, I slung it across my shoulder before glancing at Miss Belle, Hard Boiled, and Zeta. “Pardon, small family matter needed attending. Where were we?”
“About to be attacked by monsters and you were telling us why you weren’t going to explode when you stick your horn in that anthill over there,” the skeleton answered, nodding toward the crystal focus in the center of the room.
I drew in a deep breath and regretted it immediately; the room stank of charred corpses. Marching over to the altar, I leaned over to stare down into the gemstone’s depths. “To be clear, I may still explode. I am relying on a certain amount of luck. If I do and we...by some miracle...survive this day, then it will be up to you to tell someone with a modicum of magical power that there are sane, living ponies trapped in the walls of the pylons. The spells to free them are relatively simple to find and the communication spell in my brother’s journal will allow you to speak to them.”
Zeta carefully tested her leg, finding the bandage solid as she put her weight on it. “There are...sane persons? They have kept their minds while...in the mortar? Can they hear us?”
“No, not right now. But they have instructions and should they follow them, I will survive.” Raising myself onto my back legs, I positioned my hooves on either side of the crystal, tried to relax the knots in my shoulders, and channeled a trickle of magic. The burning sensation in my horn intensified. “Miss Belle? Your shield, if you please? If nothing else, it will keep my organs in a conveniently shaped bag.”
Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and put a hoof on my shoulder. “You’re a brave sort, Mister Tome. Your dad would have been right proud, can I just say.”
“I like to think he would,” I replied, pushing a little more power into the crystal. It stung and there was an immediate hiss of feedback, but I persisted, forcing my battered leylines to obey. “Maybe I will get to ask him here in a moment.”
“We’ll keep killing until we’re down or you give us a signal,” Ancestor Belle added as a tingling glow suffused my body and I was, once more, locked in place. Through the door, I heard the first howl of what might have been a further pack of P.A.C.T. creatures on the way. “Make it count.”
Zeta raised her leg and gave me the salute of a zebra praetorian guard: tapping her forehead, then her chest over her heart.
Another breath.
I jammed my horn against the crystal.
----
‘You will not be burned.’
‘You will free us.’
‘We will keep you safe.’
‘We are your Shield.’
----
For a few extremely long seconds, all I could do was breathe and try to keep track of time by counting my heartbeats. I felt the power rush in like a slosh of water down a spillway, filling every inch of me to bursting. It made hauling on the spellcore of that ridiculous armored vehicle seem downright tame by comparison, but as I hadn’t died instantly I tried to put it out of my mind.
The blood that gushed over my upper lip was entirely expected, as was the coppery flavor that suddenly spilled out between my teeth; one can’t channel magics at the liminal edge of equine biology without a few days spent in hospital from time to time. Still, the steady dripping from my ears was a tad worrying.
Mercy, had I not even managed to cast the control spells, yet?
I quickly pulled the spell forms into my vibrating thoughts and began weaving them with a few little exploratory magics. The intricate webs of lines, force, and arithmetic fought with me and with one another, each wrestling to bathe themselves in the arcane energies simmering through my system. Every single enchantment threatened to break free and run rampant, casting the most illogical extreme it could manage before its agency should peter out.
I held them tight, wrapping layer after layer of protection around each spell with back checks and forward checks making sure no single spell was getting too powerful.
The pain slowly receded as I set to my task.
A glowing, multi-dimensional starfish began to take shape in my mind, spilling vast tentacles with dozens of evenly placed points of tightly tangled magic which I realized represented the pylons. Each pylon was surrounded by hundreds of floating motes: souls of the trapped. Reaching out, I tried the gentlest brush of will against those systems, only to find myself pitched back with enough force that I felt something in my knee crack, though I didn’t move physically from my place at the altar; Miss Belle’s spell saw to that. Most likely they’d have to carry me out. Still, a limp was said to be fetching.
A monstrous dead body fell across my vision for a moment, before being hauled away. Battle was joined in the pylon chamber. Another creature, its eyes maddened, staggered through my line of sight. Zeta rode its back, choking the life out of the beast with a piece of strap looped around its throat.
I tried to ignore the pleading, relieved look in its eyes as it breathed its last.
Once more in the system, I began peering at the outside edges of the gigantic starfish, and my heart sank. Its sprawling, perfect form was almost too much to comprehend. There were layers within layers of spellwork, overlaid with protection spells that might take decades to unravel.
‘You are not here to unravel it.’
Strange, to hear father’s voice in that place. Of course, father was long dead. Where had it come from?
Ah. Yes.
The day I understood my father’s love.
----
“Limerence!” father barked, putting a hoof on my shoulder as I hunched over the vile little puzzle, my teeth clenched. Sweat poured off my body, steaming as it hit my burning horn and leaving the tiny exam room cloyingly humid.
“F-Father?” I stammered, trying to keep my focus on the puzzle sitting on the table in front of me. It was an ugly little thing in the shape of a monumentally pregnant mare, her eyes frightened and bulging from her wooden skull as she lay on her side.
“You have had an hour. I gave you a simple directive. Retrieve the final doll. Why do you fail, my son?”
I set the puzzle down and slowly looked up into Don Tome’s striped face. His stoney expression gave away nothing, though there was a hint of disappointment hiding somewhere behind his eyes. I swallowed and lowered my head.
“I...I cannot do it, Father. This is beyond my abilities,” I replied.
“It is not beyond your abilities, son. It is beyond your imagination.” Picking up the puzzle, my father quickly brought it down on the edge of the table. It let out a loud snap, then shattered; the interior was solid stone. “You believed there were dolls inside. Why?”
I stared at the puzzle for a long moment, then looked up. “B-because you told me there were.”
“I lied to you. You must have known that the second you scanned the artifact.”
I lowered my head. “It seemed more likely my scan was being manipulated by something in the interior structure than that you would--”
“You failed because you could not imagine that I would lie to you. You must not trust that the systems you interact with were designed as traps or as tools, nor that the people who created them have explicable reasoning systems. What is a tool to you, may be a weapon to someone else. Likewise, this is not a puzzle. You believed it was a puzzle because I told you it was. If you are to survive as an Archivist, even the most fundamental understandings must be challengeable. A father can lie to his son and the key to an artifact of near infinite complexity and value can be as simple as—”
----
‘—pressing the shiny red button.’
I pulled my thoughts together and and breathed a sigh. My lungs let out an unfortunate bubbling rattle. I’d also seemingly gone blind in one eye. When had that happened? Nevermind.
Part of me wanted to be terrified. I could feel my organs gradually liquifying inside me, but what good would it have done to be frightened? Death was inevitable or it wasn’t, with very few inbetweens.
Back to the task at hoof, I watched as the great, spreading shape of the working that controlled Detrot spilled open in my mind’s eye. The spell was an artwork built by a thousand tiny acts of individual genius, compounded into something so grand as to be impossible for one pony to fully comprehend. It was a shimmering testament, a magnum opus, a swan song.
It was familiar.
More than that. It was vulnerable. That could not simply be an assumption. No system, no matter how grandiose, was utterly impervious to the niggling of entropy or the teasing of chaos. Besides, if it was invulnerable, I would be dead soon, anyway. As Hard Boiled would say, ‘It’s worth it to stay optimistic’. Or perhaps he would never say that. Hard to imagine him saying that, now that I think about it.
The shape was that of the city, a map laid out in abstract; I could almost see the various points around the Bay of Unity where pylons were marked out, connected with immense lines of power to one another which were obscured by layer upon layer of camouflaging enchantments. Most were focused towards Uptown, pushing great pulses of glittering energy.
I began sending out gentle feelers of scanning magics, not really paying much attention to what they sent back so much as to where they were snuffed out by the immense powers throbbing through the system. I did get a few interesting tidbits, though: the fishy taste of psionic magics, the cinnamon flavor of emotional spells, a rotten flesh smell that could only be necromancy, and a hot bubbling cauldron of other schools which should not have been playing with each other as harmoniously as they were.
Gradually, patterns began to emerge.
Here, a scanning spell lasted a half second longer than it did over there. A light probe managed to catch a twinge of additional resolution from the interior of another pylon where there stood another burning skeleton. A third bundled in a vision of fighting taking place just outside in the street, where a squad of griffins wrestled with a dozen troopers in a flailing, cross-sky battle before vanishing behind a building.
‘Interesting. The closest to Uptown I get, the longer my spellworks last. Why should that be? There’s far more magic moving through that...unless—’
I pulled back and wound a spell I hadn’t thought I’d find two uses for in my little adventure around a quick scan, then tossed it across as much of the giant magical form as I could, watching as it dissipated. The spell was the same I’d used to measure distances inside The Office and it cheerily vaporized upon the altar of my curiosity while returning just enough data to confirm my suspicions; the form was imperfect.
‘They couldn’t make the pylons symmetrical...because the terrain is not symmetrical. If that is the Bay of Unity, then...that must be the pylon near the old toy factory and above...the monument to Captain Spitfire. It should, logically, be right there, but they couldn’t build a pylon in a public park, so it’s just down the hill, instead.’
The more I looked, the more I could see those little discrepancies. They were tiny and surely only cost the entire working a bit of efficiency and information speed, but that was all I needed.
‘All that redundancy built in,’ I thought, ‘and nopony thinks to prevent a Distributed Deviation of Spellwork.”
Working quickly while trying to ignore the fact that blood was running off the end of my nose in a steady stream, I forged a simple spell. A spell every unicorn learns.
Foals refer to it as the ‘Tell me how magical you are!’ spell. Scholars know better; it is a request to a spell matrix to return the stability of its enchanted forms and paradigms. Even the maddest creature does not leave their spells without a means of determining if the spell is complete and working.
Pulling it into my thoughts, I wrapped it in a second enchantment that everypony learns the day they’re first expected to take notes: The ‘Copy Me That’.
Then I tossed it into the Shield network.
The first dozen copies burned before they could activate.
Spell thirteen, lucky thirteen, found a place between two pylons where the magical connection was especially weak and nestled into their system. A moment later, the magic began to multiply.
The great starfish changed, in a tiny, almost imperceptible fashion; it would call back to me, to tell me just how powerful it was...repeatedly.
I braced as a flood of over a billion threads of arcane return exploded in all directions.
The gently waving arms of the starfish shape froze in place, stuttered, then froze again.
I’d gone blind in both eyes and deaf in one ear. One of my limbs felt like it wasn’t really properly attached anymore, though with Ancestor Belle’s shield around me, it was impossible to tell. The pain was excruciating, but concentrating on that earned me nothing. Regardless, my thoughts were clear.
Time for the final slice.
I could not alter the spell in its entirety, but one tiny instruction—hidden amongst all the other infinitely complex instructions governing the Shield—was sure to be overlooked if it appeared harmless enough to the mass of failsafes that I could even then feel scrambling to find the self-copying wyrm I’d slipped into the pattern. Keep it simple. Keep it easy to ignore.
‘What makes two doors different? Only what is behind them.’
I felt the magics fuse with one another, sinking into the brief window granted by my attack.
Soon, the time would arrive.
‘Open sesame.’
----
I let the magic drop, finding myself back in the world of the living, though only barely.
I slumped as every muscle gave out at once, letting my bodyweight fall against the inside of the softly sputtering shield. I could only make out vague details more than a meter from my prison; the room was filled with a billowing cloud of smoke most likely from the dozens of burning corpses littered about the space. My lungs hurt, but no worse than any other part of me, which was to say it all hurt. My tongue felt the size of a watermelon between my teeth.
Hard Boiled Senior stood on the opposite side of the altar, watching me closely. His glowing eyes darted this way and that, up and down my frame, before settling on my face. The skeleton was soaked in blood and his sports jacket was torn very nearly to shreds, but he was in one piece.
Behind him, Zeta lay on her side, the strap she’d used to strangle one of the beasts tied tightly around the stump of one of her forelegs; it was gone just below the knee. She seemed to be in some sort of meditation. I couldn’t turn my head, but I could just make out a crimson shape in the corner of my vision. It resolved, after a second, into Ancestor Belle picking over the kit of one of the smoking troopers.
The bodies were piled up in heaps, though a particularly large beast with mandibles instead of a lower jaw was wedged halfway through the door with a gaping wound in its forehead. If anything else was trying to get in, it would have to get by that.
‘How can I see them?’ I thought, ‘I was blind a moment ago. I felt my optic nerve rupture. Strange.’
Finding myself still able to see did not improve the other sensations my body was experiencing; I was still deaf in one ear and the interior of the tiny magical shield was slick with various fluids. Granted, I’d been a bit dull in that ear before, since having had it removed by my brother.
“Pretty sure he’s alive, somehow,” Hard Boiled Senior murmured inside my head. “Can’t say as I see how that might be.”
“I haven’t heard anything moving outside in a few minutes and the air is getting pretty thick in here,” Zeta added, opening her eyes and wincing as she pulled a seemingly random piece of flesh from nearby. It took me a second to recognize it as the other half of her severed leg. She began wrapping it in a scrap of cloth
I canted my working ear toward the door and could hear nothing from the street. Not even an echo.
“The door sealed itself a few minutes ago,” Ancestor Belle replied, “Right after you lost the leg. Keep that close. Bloom might be able to do something about getting it reattached, if we can get it in an ice chest. You think Mister Tome managed to do...whatever he was trying to do?”
“We’re not dead,” Hard Boiled said, tapping his chest which let out a noise like a broken xylophone. “I’d say that’s a pretty good sign.”
“You think we can afford to get him out of that shield? He looks pretty rough,” the elder Crusader answered, wiping something foul out of her mane before sitting down and wringing it with her forehooves. A hot stream of liquid splashed all over the floor. “I am going to the spa for a year, win or lose. The afterlife better have a spa.”
“What else are we going to do? Leave him here?”
I tried to move my head, but my neck hurt. Pulling my tongue into my muzzle, I swallowed and tasted too many unpleasant things to count. I tried again and found my mouth too dry to do more than croak, but it was enough.
“I-I...w-would apprec...appreciate...if...you d-didn’t...” I choked out.
Belle stepped closer as the shield faded and I sagged onto the floor, gasping as my stomach muscles spasmed a few times. I coughed a wet glob of something grey onto the floor which looked worryingly like a piece of lung. Fortunately, the second it was free of my throat, I was able to inhale a deep, glorious breath of smoke. I set about a gagging, heaving seizure, one rear leg spasming violently as the true extent of the agony I was in was finally given lease. My horn was the worst; it felt like a railroad nail driven squarely into the crown of my skull.
“Sweet Celestia, colt. That looks like a piece of your stomach. You should be dead!”
“M-many of us s-share that condition.” I shuddered and tried to raise my head, but my neck refused to support its weight. “I...I s-suspect our f-friends in the pylon have something to d-do with that. A moment. Could you...check my surveillance ladybugs?”
Hard Boiled Senior trotted over and reached one fleshless hoof down to grab my leg. He turned it over, then back and shook his skull. “Three dead, but the rest are still moving. Look a bit dazed, but I think they’re transmitting.”
“Then...it...it is done. I think it is done. We must leave before we...s-suffocate. The pylon key s-should still work, though we must close the d-door when we are gone, else the magic I wove will not work.”
Raising my voice as much as I could to make sure the remaining ladybugs heard, I gave my final instructions. “Hard Boiled. If you are still listening...wait for Taxi’s signal to make...make your run. There should be an opening at the intersection of Sol and Lunar streets. The Shield believes this pylon d-door has moved there. Or perhaps t-that it was always there. Code word to open the hole is...‘Scholar’.”
With that, I let the blackness come.
----
‘Oh, my son. I am so proud of you. I will welcome you one day. Until then, you must finish your work. There are still puzzles to solve.’
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God damn! I take it, In the next chapter we will return to Hard Boiled?
Bones is Sans now, I hope you realize that.
Disintergrating amounts of magical power, and Limerence only gets partially liquefied? He's got off lucky, I say. Another awesome Limerence chapter, and by the fact he's still barely conscious at the end I do say he's gonna be out of commission for quite a long while, this time. But hey! If Slip Stitch can reconstitute Hardy from a burnt corpse rearranging internals seems like child's play in comparison.
Still, it's a lot of lost souls, and that's just the sane ones. Where to stuff them all? Zefu's sins have only become all the more apparent after the conversation with them. There's hints of some kind of redemption with his question, but if he gets a body back I'm honestly not sure if he can ever make up for all he did.
Zeta's new foreleg is gonna need a few upgrades, if it can't get reattached. Maybe she could do with a coil of wire? Imagine the things she could do. Vibration settings are standard, of course.
Real nice final message there. Very fitting for Lim's character arc. Though, that does beg the question of where it's coming from...but if Hardy can have Juniper paying him visits in limbo I'm sure Don Tome can do the same.
Limerence is amazing... And I'm sad that I must wait again for more words.
9852600 Nope! Nor will Limerence be returning for next chapter.
-Chessie
*Wipes the tears away*
Limerence, Just good on ya. Doing what is, what should be, because its right, hell even stood aside for this.
You've paid the price, and I hope, that you can get what is coming truly in the rest.
9852600
Next chapter will likely be Swift and Taxi's assault on PACT HQ.
Damn. This is amazing. Always a good read.
9852799
Yeah, it makes more sense.
Complete the setup for grand finale.
That, was one heck of a hack job, in pretty much all senses of the word? Always something you thought was acceptable enough leaves enough of a gap for someone better to slip through, and then it becomes Someone Elses Problem?
I take it Sweetie Belle couldnt use her horns Wave Beam because the Pylon can contain it, but also her shield was being used for Limerace so even in the open, she and everyone else wouldve ceased to be?
9852636
Take up blacksmithing?
Of all the dumb questions to ask at a time like this, this one seems to be a pretty popular choice.
Limerance does seem to be a little more solidly in the Good alignment column than his father.
To be fair, I'm not sure they're completely sane. Just stable.
... I can see a lot of NC-17 uses for that.
You're one of Hardy's boon companions. You've definitely got enough luck that this won't kill you. It will, however, probably hurt like hell.
It's more than a little worrying how comfortable Lim is with this thought.
Given how she's likely to die, her afterlife is probably Valhalla, so unless it's the version from the Ah! My Goddess anime, a spa seems unlikely.
9852600
I know Limerence has a lot of fans, and I'm one too. But I'd like to nominate myself president of the Swift Cuddles fan club. Show me more tiny Pegasus kicking huge amounts of ass, please and thank you
9853031 You will not be disappointed with what comes next. Limerence got his big episode. Taxi and Swift had to get theirs.
-Chessie
A magical DDoS, of course, you mad genius
A level of beauty and completeness I've never experienced before on this site.
Holy hell....
I don't know whether to applaud or cringe? Maybe both? That was... just, wow.
9853638
Cringing is probably the right response, but...can I say translating the actual effect of a DDOS into magical terminology was hard, but I think the outcome was solid.
-Chessie
9853114
Awwww, thanks. I really am trying to get the story finished and as close to perfect as I can.
-Chessie
9852636
I expect that Zefu will get a body, if only for all his victims to kill him again. And again. And again. Perhaps once the line is done, he might get some sort of afterlife.
9853743 The epilogue is going to be pretty long, methinks...
-Chessie
MAGICAL DDOS ARE YOU SHITTING ME
in all seriousness, Limerence should by all accounts be dead.
9853955 I thought you might like that.
-Chessie
9854418
Hmm. Well thank you! It’s nice to be considered.
Wait...it would be such a jebait if Chessie killed off Limerence. I think Chessie can pull it off, but it would be nice if the big brain lived.
9854489 Eh, it would also have been kind of an unfired Chekov's Gun if Limerence died. I mean, I did set up all that stuff with the souls in the pylon and so on. Besides, I don't want one of those crappy wistful endings.
-Chessie
9854757
I see you’re starting SoD. You won’t regret it.
9866055
The fact that you've made it up as it goes along (for the most part) only makes it that much more impressive. I love this story (on my third re-read so far) and I look forward to every update!
9867332
Well, we'll be done REAL soon. Promise. I'm ready to move on to other things, but I won't rush the ending.
-Chessie
Lim tome you are an absolute genius! And how are you not dead yet?
9853955
9869305
Given what Lim just went through, what we've seen, and the nature of the Wish that gave him protection, I'm not too sure that he isn't.
9880768
Death is a relative condition. Some people die. The lucky ones.
-Chessie
9880768
True only time will tell.
9888843
... holy shnikes! I forgot I even wrote that!
One of my rare brain storms actually striking paydirt instead of fizzling out lol.
9878946
This story is almost twice as long as the King James Version of The Holy Bible.
So theoretically you COULD print it, but we’d probably need heavy duty magnifying glasses to read the small print just to get it to fit in a normal sized book.
9888866 You have no idea how much I abhor that particular truth.
I really, really, really did not intend for it to get to this length and I am so thankful to be finishing it. This really was...and I said it before...just supposed to be a writing exercise.
-Chessie
9888892
*Snickers* You went in for treadmill run set to easy and some light dumbbell lifting... and ended up taking the full Arnold Schwarzenegger course instead!
Still, I am glad as this has been one of the most fun and craziest MLP stories I’ve had the joy of reading.
9878946
A trilogy!
I'm literally paying someone to read this story.
9900172 Heh, for real? Did you bet someone they couldn't finish it or somesuch?
-Chessie
9900191
GMBlackjack reads stories and puts them into the League of Sweetie Belles, where a bunch of sweetie belles travel the multiverse.
I paid through his patreon to read it, but also because I know he'll love it. (hopefully)
Good News: I'm finally caught up.
Bad News (for me): Now I have to wait for the story to continue.
Hahahhahah, oh my god, he fucking ddosed the pylons. Thats fucking golden
The fifth time I've read this and counting and I still cry at this part
9853770
Please tell me the epilog includes the date
Sixth readthrough. Still makes me tear up.