• Published 17th May 2018
  • 499 Views, 19 Comments

7DSJ: The Knife's Edge - Flynt Coal



A pony displaced in space and time finds herself attending university in Michigan when a murder occurs. What's more, Equestrian magic may be involved.

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August 28 - Erased

Standing on the threshold of Shrinking Violet’s dorm room, Jade Lily tried to temper the warring emotions within her. It was an uphill battle.

It had been three days since the tragedy that claimed the life of her friend. What disturbed Jade the most was just how quickly life at Michigan Tech returned to normal. Sure, there had been some talk of the girl who jumped from the roof of the residence building, but now it was like nothing had ever happened. Violet’s roommate now had a replacement, and every topic of conversation had moved on to the next big scandals: who was sleeping together, who had broken up, and what assignments the professors had them doing.

It was like Violet wasn’t merely dead: She had been erased. Well, not if I have anything to say about it.

Jade composed herself and with a wave of her hand, magically unlocked the door to what had once been her friend’s dorm. Jade had been talking to the new occupants of Violet’s room, and had made sure they would both be elsewhere for the next couple of hours. She had some investigating to do.

The official police statement on Shrinking Violet’s death had been that it was a suicide. The police had backed that up with the scars on her wrists: evidence of self-harm, they said. But Jade knew Violet. She was a quiet and nervous girl—a true sufferer of social anxiety if Jade had ever seen it—but once she got past her walls and Violet allowed herself to open up, what Jade saw was a girl with a passion for learning. A girl dreaming to be a game programmer at a large company like Ubisoft or Naughty Dog, and who had the raw talent and drive to pursue it. A girl who loved Broadway musicals and cheesy old movies.

A girl whose light would tragically never shine on the world again. So Jade was determined to shine twice as brightly for her.

Because she knew there was no way Violet had killed herself. There was just too much that didn’t add up. Jade had already snuck up onto the roof where Violet had supposedly jumped, but found no trace of anything suspicious. That in itself seemed suspicious to Jade, and now she found herself in her friend’s old dorm.

The myriad of posters for various Broadway productions had been removed, and Violet’s organized clutter had been cleared. The bathroom cupboards were emptied of the sizable amount of anxiety medication (enough to provide a comfortably fatal overdose, had Violet truly been of a mind to kill herself). These too had been erased, and the room looked completely different from the one Jade had spent many nights in. Studying for exams, watching movies on a small laptop screen, talking, laughing.

Jade quickly blinked the building tears away. She promised to let them come later, after she was done with this. She methodically searched the room front to back, removing items before carefully returning them to their place. After thinking for some time that her search would yield nothing, she finally spotted it: a tiny stain no bigger than a thumbprint in the far corner of the room.

The stain was brown and faded—easily blending in with the others of its kind throughout the entire residence. Hand glowing with arcane power, Jade knelt by the tiny speck and sent forth a spell. A soft ping rang through her mind, confirming what Jade suspected: It was blood. Another spell, this one taking longer, analyzed the blood, and when it was finished, Jade’s mind was filled with images of a pretty young woman with dark skin, short red hair and a shy face adorned with large glasses. It was Violet’s blood.

The next spell Jade cast was one of her own design. She first got the idea for it watching some police drama with Braeburn. The perpetrator in a murder case on the show had meticulously cleaned the blood away from the scene of the crime, so the officers had used a chemical called luminol to reveal an area where blood had been. After careful study of the exact mix of chemicals in the compound (and wasn’t the internet a marvelous invention?), Jade was able to craft a light spell that would create a chemiluminescent reaction to traces of blood similar to luminol. At the time it had merely been an experiment of curiosity. Jade never thought she would actually use it for something like this.

As she feared, when Jade cast the spell—coating the room in a soft blue light—the thumbprint sized stain on the floor became a massive blob glowing a bright blue. Like the TV criminal, Violet’s killer had carefully cleaned up after themselves. Jade spotted another luminescent blue blob in the corner across from the first, but apart from that, the room was clean.

Then Jade noticed the carpet. More big blue blobs seemed to spiderweb out of it, like the carpet was at the epicenter of an explosion of glowing goo. So, with a wave of her hand, Jade called forth a simple levitation spell to remove the carpet. Jade’s arms fell slack and the carpet slumped dully to the floor when she saw what it hid.

Oh Faust, it’s worse than I thought, Jade thought with dismay as she looked at the very clearly runic patterns in the glowing blue. The fact they were showing up so clearly through Jade’s “luminol spell” meant that they had been etched into the floor before Violet’s blood was spilled. The purpose of the runes was all too clear, and all of a sudden, Iris’ words from the week before echoed in Jade’s mind.

That girl’s going to die a virgin.

What Iris couldn’t have known, of course, was that Violet would die because she was a virgin. All at once the terrible ramifications of this discovery began to play out in Jade’s mind.

There’s another magic user in Michigan Tech. Human? The runes almost look Equestrian.

Will they try to kill again?

Jade nearly gasped out loud when she heard the doorknob start to turn. At first she thought that the residents of the dorm were back early, and she hastily dispelled her luminol spell and replaced the carpet before pressing her back to the wall, activating a simple invisibility spell. But the doorknob kept fidgeting, and Jade realized that the real residents of this room wouldn’t be having this much trouble gaining entry.

Finally the door was forced open, and Jade’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the dark figure that entered. Of course… it only made sense that it would be him. The black-clad young man with horn-rimmed glasses and long, greasy looking black hair was always watching them in their English elective, wasn’t he? Jade had always thought he was staring at her all that time, but now she knew the truth.

Code Break would always leave shortly after Violet; it was her he’d always been staring at. Her he was always behind—Violet’s slimy shadow.

Jade held her breath as Code silently closed the door behind him, taking one last peek into the hall to make sure he hadn’t been followed. Then Jade was upon him. Dispelling her invisibility, Jade lunged forward, grabbing Code by the collar and slamming him hard against the wall right next to the door.

“Why in Faust’s name do you trespass here, miscreant?!” In her passion, Jade slipped partially back to her Old Equestrian dialect.

“J-Jade?” The man stared at her wide-eyed, his long black hair partially obscuring his face. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you!” Jade spat, making a point to correct her earlier slip. “Returning to the scene of your crime?”

What?! Are you insane?!

The genuine shock in his voice momentarily gave Jade pause. “Explain yourself!”

“I-I’m here because I want answers,” Code said quietly. “I don’t believe Violet killed herself. She wasn’t suffering from depression like everyone seemed to think. She still had so much she wanted to do!”

His answer took Jade aback. “How do you know that?”

“We’re in the same class, remember? I heard all of your conversations with her.” Then to Jade’s surprise, Code’s eyes started to fill with tears. “Truth is… I really liked her. Always wanted to talk to her… to ask her out. But… every time I tried, I-I freaked out. Too many traumatic experiences in high school, I guess.”

Then Code broke down sobbing, and Jade could only let go of his collar and take a step back. “M-maybe if I wasn’t such a fucking coward, things would be different. Maybe she’d even still be alive….”

As the incredibly strange young man before her continued his pitiful sobs, Jade could only stand there. It took her awhile to figure out what to say.

“Alright, I’m sorry. Guess I misjudged you, Code,” she finally said. “And don’t blame yourself for what happened to her.”

Jade looked down at the rug, guilt rushing through her. It was a magic user that had killed her. Jade was probably the only person in this half of the country that could have saved Violet. “If anyone failed her, it was me.”

Code looked at her quizzically, but Jade didn’t elaborate. How could she?

“So how did you get in here, anyway?” she asked, hoping that doing so would make him forget about her earlier statement.

Code pulled out a key card in answer. It was the same size as the ones used to enter the dorms. “I made this,” he sniffed. “Programmed it with a code of my own design to bypass the locks.”

Jade took the offered card and gave it a look. “Huh. Pretty impressive.” She then turned her scrutinizing stare Code’s way. “You haven’t been using it to break into other people’s dorms, have you?”

“Of course not! I made it specifically for this occasion. I don’t plan on using it again either.”

Jade gave the card back, and after taking it, Code nervously ran a hand through his long hair. “So uh, I take it you came here for the same reason as me, huh?” Jade nodded, and Code asked, “Find anything?”

For one brief moment, Jade considered telling him about the cleaned bloodstains, but that would lead to more questions she didn’t feel like answering. “No. Place is clean.”

Looking disappointed, Code sighed. “Figures. Can’t even do anything right for her after she’s gone.”

“Y’know, if that little magic card of yours is anything to go by, you’re a pretty talented guy, Code,” Jade said. “If you cleaned up your act a little—y’know, actually went through with talking to girls instead of staring creepily at them from a distance—there’s lots of girls here that would be willing to give you a chance.”

At that, Code actually smiled, his pale complexion turning a faint red. “Heh. Thanks, but… I don’t know. Not yet anyway. Violet was…. There’s not anyone else like her.”

Jade let out a sad sigh. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“I probably never had a chance with her anyways. From the looks of it, she preferred girls.”

Jade blinked. Violet never actually told her about who it was she liked. “Um… how do you figure?”

“I saw her making out with a girl late one night in the common area,” Code answered, blushing even more. “I, uh… was trying to mind my own business, I swear!”

“Huh. She never told me she was seeing someone.”

“It happened pretty recently. It, uh… looked like her first time.”

“Huh.” Jade was ready to leave it at that, but then a terrible thought suddenly occurred to her. “Wait, how recently was this?”

“About three or four days ago,” Code answered, before giving a slight gasp. “Oh God… it might actually have been the night before she died!”

“Did she and this other girl leave together?”

Code nodded, then his face went even paler than usual. “Wait… y-you don’t think…?”

“Code, do you remember what this other girl looked like?”

“N-not really. Her back was to me and she was wearing a hat. Could have been anyone.”

Jade was unable to hide the disappointed frown. “And you didn’t hear a name?”

Code shook his head. “She had a real distinct voice, though. Kinda husky. I’d definitely know it if I heard it again.”

“Hmm….” The trouble would be finding this mystery girl. Fortunately, the makings of a plan started to form in Jade’s head. “Hey Code, how’d you like to be my date for Hotshot’s party tomorrow?”

Author's Note:

It's going to be one hell of a party...