Imbalanced: Legacy of Light

by Nameless Narrator

25-1: What the hay is going on?

Like always these days, the ruined Silver Sun mansion in Manehattan was cold and quiet. Patches of black fire still burned in place without seemingly having anything to devour, and the air stood still.

At least that was until an eye-watering, vertical tear in space opened straight in front of the partially crumbled entrance, and from it the robed and masked form of Flow stepped out. He didn’t even turn his head to look around before walking into the crumbled mansion, crossed the circular lobby, and headed down into the cellars.

After a while, he stopped by a dead end, and pressed a spot on the wall. The same one which some time ago Bucket used to access the secret Silver Sun armory. As expected, the wall slid away, and Flow entered. None of the artefacts inside interested him in the slightest, until he stopped in front of the armored ponnequin, and without any apparent use of magic, the seal key Bucket had hidden under the armor floated over to him.

Flow pocketed the amulet Harriet had gone through so much effort and pain to follow, opened a fresh rift, and disappeared.

***

The unicorn in his full plate armor and the draconequus whirled around each other in a dance of death.

Blazing Light grunted and his horn sparked as his telekinesis strained to block the one-handed blow of Cromach’s distinctly two-handed axe. He used to be a paladin experienced in perpetual war and with close combat skill ingrained into him through pain and infinite grind, but he was still a unicorn with limits. He needed at least a little space to get himself to safety and focus on counterattacking, none of which Cromach was giving him whatsoever.

On the other heavily bruised and battered hoof, this was the first time Cromach was fighting in a draconequus form instead of a griffon, which clearly showed, because after fifteen minutes of brutal melee, Blazing was still standing upright.

He had never lasted against griffon Cromach for more than five minutes. Every time, he’d been outmatched in strength, speed, agility, experience, and most of all - stamina. Blazing had realized after several sparring sessions the sad truth, which was that the fights simply weren’t winnable in a traditional sense. Victory here only meant lasting longer than during any of the earlier beatings.

Following the blocked swing, Blazing’s protective shield enveloping his body shattered when Cromach followed the attack by spinning around and giving him a backhand slap with such force that the unicorn spun in the air before landing on his side, gasping for breath and seeing triple.

Cromach floated over, and started taking Blazing’s armor off. The dazed unicorn couldn’t do more than focus on his breathing and not throwing up.

“Sorry,” Cromach lowered his voice, “I got carried away a little. Just relax and try to breathe. I’ll take care of everything.”

He didn’t dare try to use his chaos powers to untangle all armor straps at once in fear of what could happen, so stripping Blazing was taking a while. Cromach sighed, realizing Blazing would need few days of bed rest after this to deal with concussion. In this body, Cromach was vastly stronger than at any point as a divine-touched griffon, it wasn’t even a close contest.

It had its advantages despite always having to be careful around others, such as being able to wrap his body around Blazing’s after he’d stripped the unicorn completely, grab his backside… for support, obviously, ehm… and float along with him back into the mansion, namely the showers.

This Blazing didn’t have the round, firm but jiggly ass of an zebra whorse Cromach loved so much on his original lover, instead he was build like one would expect from a classic unicorn warrior. Come to think of it…

...there was nothing he remembered.

Under the stream of warm water, Cromach caught himself gently stroking the unicorn’s cheek. He leaned closer, feeling Blazing’s breath on his nose, and pressed his lips against the pony. It was completely different than ever before, co much better than while having a beak. Just the feeling of lips against lips-

“Get away from me, you creep!” Blazing pushed him away, tried to shuffle backwards on the floor slick with water, and slipped. Cromach caught him, lauching himself through the air. Blazing immedately started to struggle to free himself.

“Stop!” Cromach slowly let him go, lowered his head, and sighed, “I’m sorry.”

Snapping his talons, he disappeared.

He finally realized it with absolute clarity - he wasn’t in love with a unicorn, he was in love with a memory.

***

Bucket knocked on the door of Cromach’s suite. He was using his main body this time, and it wasn’t for calibrations.

There was no answer, but his scanners reported serious amount of divinity behind it, so he opened them and entered anyway. After a single step, he found himself standing in starry darkness, invisible floor marked only by faint, green shimmer of steps descending about one pony-height down to a center in which floated Cromach, eyes closed and cross-legged.

“I didn’t know you had your own pocket dimension,” commented Bucket, giving the blackness around an appraising look.

The white draconequus looked straight at him with an expression Bucket categorized as resigned. After a sigh, he asked:

“What can I do for you, Bucket?”

“I need access to the archives locked by you inside this body,” stated the robot, “I received Heavy Hoof’s transmission from Pine Hills, and it references something from those archives. I’m not sure what until I see what’s there. It might hold a key to everything that’s going on.”

“Password - beard,” replied Cromach.

Several scans of Cromach later, Bucket was able to unlock his archives. The password wasn’t a simple word, rather a word coupled with the right speaker, and identifying the right speaker required measuring divinity, vocal atributes, everything. Of course, there were safeguards to access the archives in case of Cromach being unreachable, but those hadn’t proven necessary.

Information, memories, and events flooded Bucket’s mind, causing him to freeze for a moment as he processed the previously locked mysteries, and drew certain conclusions.

“I have two things to talk about, based on this. You’re not going to like either.”

“It’s not like you to beat around the bush, Bucket. Come on.”

“As you wish,” the robot sighed, “I think we can assess with a good degree of certainty that the drained Silver Sun finances went to Brauheim and Rift.”

“How? Dwarves never needed gold or magic particularly, mostly biological materials needed to build or grow food underground,” Cromach raised an eyebrow, “None of our exchanges of technology were based on gold, and the amount of money used from Silver Sun accounts would have bought so much raw material the caravans would be lining all the way to Zebrica.”

“From the pictures and examinations of the Crystal Empire laboratory used for project Soulstealer, and from the schematics of the sword itself, the used technology didn’t belong to ponies or griffons, or even us. Only dwarves can make specialized equipment like that. Unfortunately, I still have no clues as to who is using our unlimited card. As for the sword, it was made by the same process I used to reforge the Blades of Balance and craft the final one for Blazing Light. However, unlike the Blades, it doesn’t seem to have any special properties I can identify. There are magical markings on it, though, but those seem highly contextual, so in the wrong hooves, the sword simply will not work as intended. Now, the istrium forging process requires dwarven equipment, but as far as we know, they don’t know the methods used for the Blades, which means that only I know those, and Starswirl’s journal is in my library, I checked.”

“No, it’s not just you,” Cromach frowns, “Blaze let Des copy the methods after we got them from Starswirl. Not the way to forge the Blades, but the prerequisites for working with istrium in the first place.”

“Duly noted,” Bucket recalculates his findings, but there are no significant changes in his conclusions, “She certainly is involved, considering she was the one who made off with the sword. Come to think of it, she might be the one with the gold card. I’ll see if I can’t figure out a way to investigate that. Now for my second topic, which involves Heavy Hoof.”

“Oh yeah, what did he find?”

“He examined the old changeling hive, and found a mix of electronic equipment from Brauheim, our variants, and griffon-pattern products. Considering the Brauheim connection and Black Ops scanning gear, it was not only obtained with our money, but also with our contacts, only mine and yours, which worries me way more.”

“I’m not surprised,” Cromach sounded as if he was barely listening, but at least he was listening.

“That, however, leads me to believe that someone might have been impersonating us, and I think said someone are changelings from Brauheim. Heavy Hoof reported a strange group of ponies retrieving the electronics from the Badlands hive. I didn’t know what to make of it until you unlocked the archive, but now I can identify them. There were dwarves, Silversmith mechs, and two changelings who, judging by your past encounters, were ranks One and Two from the northern hive. From Heavy’s report, he’s been following them through a tunnel connecting Badlands, Pine Hills, and leading north, presumably to Brauheim.”

Cromach just sighed. Bucket considered his lack of reaction, and asked:

“Come to think of it, is there a reason why you haven’t unlocked all my archives with you as a user? Something so secret only you can know? Some have been modified quite recently.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are different archives which don’t respond to your password, but are marked by your name. Plus, they aren’t supposed to be accesible outside of this body, which I find intriguing. Also, they don’t have the same safeguards in case you’d disappear permanently, they would simply be inaccessible.”

“Bucket, I returned few weeks ago, and the last thing I wanted was to get involved in some apocalyptic stuff again. I didn’t order you to hide anything other than our conversations or findings about Brauheim years ago.”

Bucket blinked, the blue circles in his eyes disappearing and turning back on. He had no reason to believe Cromach would lie. At worst, he knew he could just tell Bucket that was none of his business.

“I don’t know what to make of that, honestly,” said the robot.

Cromach shrugged.

“It’s just another big mystery...”

“Okay, I can’t ignore this anymore,” Bucket walked closer, and looked Cromach straight in the eyes, “I’ve seen more life in wilted carrots than in you right now. What’s wrong?”

“Blaze is dead. Forever.”

“What?! What happened? Did something go wrong during the training?”

“No, I don’t mean mister Blazing Light, paladin and soldier. I mean Blaze, my Blaze. He’s only a memory. I was clinging to life that’s gone, to hope that something good might come out of it. It can’t. Blaze is gone, it’s over. This… guy is just a paladin. Anyone we could have snatched from Celestia would be just as good as him. I just wanted him here for my own… reasons.”

“I will send him to train with Cross then. Still, for you this all means that you’re no worse off than you were a month ago, or am I wrong?”

“Wh- what?!”

“You met Harriet when you were coming back to Manehattan to visit the wall of memories. You knew Blaze was dead then. Only afterwards when Nightmare summoned this new Blazing Light did things change.”

Cromach sighed again.

“I… I suppose so,” he gritted his teeth, “I know what Nightmare did with this, and it worked. She just brought me hope only for me to lose it again immediately. I’m such an idiot...”

“So, what now? Are you going to leave again?”

After some self-examination, Cromach shook his head.

“No, I’m not. I feel what’s going on is a thing only I’ll be able to help with. Call it chaos sense or something, or one chatty alicorn of Time, heh.”

“Then I have one final thing to share with you. This one… might sting.”

“Oh please, I just got a mug of acid poured it into the hole where my heart used to be? What can be worse?” he facepalmed when Bucket just kept staring, “When will I learn that asking that question is a dumb idea?”

“Yeeeeah...” Bucket paused, “You see, I think that the wizard responsible for the brutal massacre going on in Zebrica is Mistake.”

Cromach bluescreened. Literally, a blue screen with random assortment of white letters appeared in front of him, and then winked out of existence.

“Alright, I’m done with this shit,” he said after a moment of silence, “Blaze is gone, so I don’t need to be here anymore either. I’m going to sort this all out right now or die trying.”

He snapped his talons, and disappeared. A moment later, Bucket found himself in his own office again. He sighed.

“Emotions, the greatest driver, and yet the worst road block.”

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

Before I read this, I must know: Why does the cover art have an anime character in it?

[Nameless Narrator]

9988691
It doesn't. That's a mask of one League of Legends blood moon skins, and it's there only because it fits the mask of the main baddie that I couldn't draw, that's all. Not connected to anything. It's just there for visual convenience.

[Two_Madmans]

Password - beard

Heh