Awakening
The girl was always passing strange. The woman is now stranger.
Her teacher (now her mentor: Dylan, 'Professor Howitzer' during class hours only) knew something about death. It was his anonymous tips which led to Allyse's corpse being discovered, his magic which left the body in a state where a more conventional cause of death could be diagnosed. The woman met her roommate's parents just once: the mother, in her grief, pummeled her until the father dragged her away, and the woman stood there and let it happen.
She discovered that the legends were false: a dead roommate doesn't grant you automatic As for the semester. (She still had to take her exams, somehow managed to pass.) It did, however, mean that the college was reluctant to give her another one. Not that anyone was blaming her, but... there was a reasonable, entirely true expectation that she was mourning. She gained a single and for the rest of her time at the college, never gave it up. There was winter break, because Dylan gave her the money to go home, and she couldn't tell her family about anything. Most of her vacation was spent sitting in the apartment, mostly because her parents had decided that eighteen doesn't matter and she wasn't allowed outside again.
(She later learns that there was a brief skirmish among the city's mages over who might get her, and they finally acknowledged that she had awakened in a way which could mean nothing except Euthanatos -- then began to spread the whispers. Mages are human and as monsters go, humans are petty ones.)
When she got back, however... that was when the balancing act began. Dylan wanted her to stay in college for as long as possible, to have as much of a normal life as she possibly could. She took one set of classes during the day, attended another at night -- and not on every night, because Allyse was dead and some of those who had been her friends felt an obligation towards the lost puppy whose owner was no longer there. They didn't care about the woman, not the way Allyse had --but a few of them tried. It gave her something which could pass for friendship, at least for a while.
But...
You could have magic. You could have normalcy. You couldn't have both.
At first, she had trouble accessing that power. Eventually, she concluded (with a little prodding) that if she'd been working out all the math for what happened prior to the event, then perhaps math was what's needed. She had already learned that one Tradition spoke of reprogramming reality and that felt like it partially fit. Entropy controls luck, luck is a matter of expressing odds, and odds are just numbers. She started to build a new kind of code, scavenged parts and tried to make them work together. A bulky laptop was the first thing to actually boot up. Eventually, the models got smaller, thinner, turned into something which might almost pass for normal. Some time after her mentor died, the tablet finally did.
She tapped into her magic (although it took a while before she truly saw it as hers) under her mentor's direction. She learned the Chodana, the code which dictated actions while maintaining sanity, and came to agree with it. And she felt no urge to kill: there were multiple Euthanatoi who finished their lives without ever taking that of another -- but she did make the decision. That if there was something which had to be done and no one else to do it, she could act again. But she was cautioned, taught to only act in neutrality and fair judgment. What had happened in the alley... that had been killing that which was already dead. She had neutralized a wraith and through sheer determination added to what might have been a touch of luck, her soul was still clean. To act emotionally against the living, to intervene again when you were personally involved...
Her mentor showed her the results, held in a prison where those who couldn't even be trusted to die properly were kept, and then gave her the weekend for the trembling to stop.
She was learning magic, and some of that was exciting. (One lesson led to a major fight.) Some of her dreams were nightmares: another led into the first meeting with that other part of her soul, her avatar. Her skill was improving, her strength increasing -- but with that came consequence. The normal subconsciously sensed the presence of the mystical and in the woman's case, it produced unease. Fear of the different. In time, as she became stronger, the deep-seated terror of a stalking predator. She hadn't learned how to turn that off, it took a lot of skill to truly pretend you were normal again for a little while, and the friends Allyse had bequeathed her went away. Some of them began to whisper. She retained her single not because she was still being given privacy for her grief, but because someone had decided that no one should ever be forced to room with her.
It happened to every mage, until they mastered the spheres and rotes necessary to shut it down. But the woman was used to being alone. She'd had a single taste of true friendship, and she'd also seen how that had ended. Being around normal people... maybe she was better off. Besides, her resonance didn't affect other mages, or anything supernatural...
...vampires used. Shifters killed. Wraiths acted on the emotions they were made from, and then those emotions flipped. Another group was composed from rumor, for to see one for what they truly were was to lose those memories to dream. And mages...
She had (and this took some time to realize, although the irony sank in immediately after) essentially joined a gang. The most hated of the gangs, the one within the fragile alliance that was forever on the verge of being turned on, turned out. After all, when someone killed those whom no one else could bring to justice, those with something to hide wondered just how closely they were being watched...
The girl, who had died, had been friendless. The woman eventually reached the point where she had a mentor, a city filled with those who whispered about her, and a family she was terrified to visit because they would only wind up feeling the same way.
She made excuse after excuse. Extra classes was her go-to and in a way, it was doubly true. Phone calls were fine and nothing was safer than a letter, but she couldn't be near them. (She had yet to fully recognize the damage done, loved them because she knew nothing else.) And all the time, she studied. Eventually, her first case was suggested to her: she did the research, prepared carefully, and judged -- that no death was necessary. A few phone calls to the proper authorities would suffice. Her mentor beamed, proud that he'd found a student who would not kill when the situation didn't call for it.
The second case left her limping away from two bodies, then spending six weeks waiting for the cracked ribs to knit.
Many of her Tradition, when trying to explain themselves to outsiders, will use the cancer analogy: the world as a single living body, and the corrupted cells must be removed. The woman was taught that, and there are a few times when she winds up trying to use the words. But it's not how she thinks of things. That which is still an engineering student sees a machine trying to run on broken parts, where the gears keep slipping and eventually, without correction, the whole thing will just fall to pieces. She thinks it's a better way to look at it, especially when it comes to how careful she has to be in considering removal: this part may be irreparably broken, but there's still five other components which depend on it. You can't just take things out and hope that what's left works better. You have to do your best to fix.
She listened for cries in the night. She moved through the shadow world, and monsters died. She was becoming stronger --
-- she hated it.
There were times when magic itself was actually fun. Sometimes the price which paradox extracted from her for experimenting with that power in ways other than what would pass as coincidence -- some of that magic was worth the pain. And she cared about her mentor, for even the fights could still be good debates. (She eventually learned that with the Ecstatics, having sex with your teacher was just about routine. It gave her a good, increasingly-rare laugh. They were absolutely attracted to each other -- intellectually.) And she was saving lives. Every death created was innocents who lived, at least for a while. But you couldn't take anything more than a rather basic satisfaction in the duty, the knowledge that you'd closed out a workday having accomplished what needed to be done, and there would always be more tomorrow. There was no joy in killing: there never could be, if she wanted to remain sane.
She had a mentor. She didn't have friends. She couldn't go near her own family.
She didn't have Allyse.
She wanted... to live through those months again. The golden time, the precious weeks when it had felt like so much was possible. To trade one kind of magic for another, the better.
She wanted her friend back.
And then her mentor died.
Somepony needed to take her to the internment area, and that was something which was only done by teleportation. Part of it was security, with at least a little of the rest in making sure the occupants weren't even completely sure where they were. (Bree did: she'd scouted the place from the outside a few times.) It meant she had to wait again, for a unicorn capable of escorting another through that lesser void. The Princesses both qualified, but... they weren't exactly in a hurry to see her.
It left Bree waiting and when the unicorn in question arrived, it turned out she'd been waiting for somepony who hated her.
She looked at Crossing Guard as he slowly entered the room. Noticed how the stallion seemed to be so much older than before. She had believed him to be middle-aged, and almost precisely so: just about in the exact center of a pony's lifespan. He didn't move that way any more.
He hated her. He didn't really like any of the human agents, but he hated Bree. It might have been because the two of them had frequent contact: the incursions from her world just hadn't stopped
until last week
and that meant they needed to talk, actually talk about what was going on.
He hated her for her failures. As hard as it was to imagine, it was possible that there was something in him which even hated her successes, when he knew how they had come about. He hated having to deal with her, supervise her when she was spending her earned hours in Equestria, hated looking at her...
But he also hated her for herself. Not for rumor or passed-along reputation: herself. He hated Bree for being Bree, and that hatred had been the closest thing she'd had to a real relationship.
He trotted into the room with his head lowered. The dark blue fur looked shoddy. He needed a good grooming, followed by wake-up juice as the second-best substitute for six hours of sleep. (The first-best remained eight hours.)
Eventually, he looked up at her, met her gaze across the empty room. She'd been left alone to wait for him, for there was nowhere else to go.
"I'm sorry."
There were strange undertones in those words. As if the stallion had said them because he'd felt the words to be necessary, and was still trying to work out whether he actually believed them.
"You're sorry," she tried. "I believe that."
"I --"
Flavorless. Neutral. Every syllable aimed directly for lowered ears. "-- you're sorry it wasn't complete. You almost had all of the incursions stopped from one place, and now you're stuck with three who can't ever go home. Seven billion dead, and you're just so sorry that the number wasn't a little. bit. higher."
His head snapped up, and she saw the familiar anger flash into his eyes.
"How dare --"
"-- no," she cut him off. "How dare you, Crossing. Every human a little piece of disaster, an infestation which has to be cleared out. Even the ones who never meant to come here, who arrived by accident, who want nothing more than to go home. You hate every last one of us, you hate what we do, what we might do, that we exist. And now you want me to believe you're sorry. What does 'sorry' even mean? Seven billion corpses take their last comfort in the fact that one unicorn is sorry. I don't know how the translation effect works: I don't know if words which have double meanings on my side come across as the same syllables on yours. So all I can do is hope this registers. You're sorry, Crossing. You're the sorriest excuse for a stallion I've ever seen."
She didn't think it would get through, and she knew it somehow had when she saw his horn ignite.
Her left hand came up, and something of darkest purple flashed on the end of a fingertip. It made him hesitate, just long enough.
"Don't," she told him. "I won't kill you. I won't even hurt you. But I'm pretty sure I've learned enough about unicorn magic to try directly countering you. You're stronger than average, aren't you? But you're not a Princess. And I'm --"
the last
he could drop the field, lower his horn, charge me, try to go physical in the hopes that I couldn't stop that and I could just stand still and
"-- it doesn't matter," she quietly finished. "Titles don't matter, for what little we had of them. Ranks. You're strong. And I'm stronger than you. That's all you need to know. But it doesn't matter, because we're not fighting. I'm -- giving you what you wanted second-most. You're going to come over here. I'll put my hand on your back. And you'll finally take me to prison."
There was just enough in him for one protest. "You're going to the settlement --"
"-- and what do you think that is?"
No answer, not from words. Eventually, something of a response was suggested by hooves slowly trotting across a marble floor, until his back was next to her hand. The right, as that was where the non-light hadn't been.
She placed her palm against warm fur. Waited.
Was there still a chance to tell them a story? There had been one when she'd been present the first time: a claimed accident, and then a way back which would only accommodate her. Another accident, then, one which could never be reversed. Except that the children were there and even lacking the full picture, they were almost guaranteed to have said something. Plus there was --
-- she hadn't been thinking about him.
It wasn't that she'd been making an effort to avoid it. Just that there was too much to think about.
Did they tell him?
Somepony had to have told --
-- the teleportation hadn't happened. They were still in the palace.
"The sooner you do this," she stated, "the sooner you never have to see me again."
"You said three."
The words had been oddly... soft.
"Sorry?"
"There's four of you. You said three."
"You know humans," Bree told the stallion. "Too stupid to count."
A single breath, with the muscles shifting under her hand, and then light flashed.
She couldn't tell you how he died. The circumstances, the killer -- any of it. He'd had a mission, one where he didn't want her providing backup: he'd felt it was far too dangerous for her. He hadn't given her a single detail, because that might be enough for her to come looking for him. He tried to protect her, he succeeded in that aspect alone, and what had been seen as too dangerous for her had also been beyond what he could manage. The little candle which had spent nearly two years burning in his sanctum without consuming a single gram of wax went out, and that was how she knew he was dead.
She couldn't even try to avenge him. Vengeance would have been personal.
There are several things which a Euthanatos is expected to be good at, and one of them is keeping a will updated. She didn't get everything: he had a few family members left, scattered around the world. But there was quite a bit to distribute. Mages are often good at making money: the hard part is not making so much that you get noticed. It's easier still when you can manipulate luck, feel an instinct as to exactly which scratch-off lottery ticket is the payout on the reel. (You couldn't do it too often, of course: people remembered winners, and then they would start to wonder why the winning just kept happening.) The woman had been trying it herself, and it had allowed her to do something new: sending money home, claiming a part-time job as a professor's assistant. (Which was the truth, at least when regarded from certain angles.) Even there, she had to be careful. It was too little to be noticed by those in power who watched for such things -- but in the ghetto, few things called for undesired attention more than flashing cash. She could pay a bill or two, ease some of the strain. Nothing more.
There were some questions about the will, of course. More than a few, because a professor leaving anything to a student -- that couldn't be seen as anything other than scandal, especially when so many had decided that anyone with the woman's body type just had to be fucking everything within reach. Which, as far as the accusers were concerned, was actually an understatement, because it was so obvious to them that she was brainless and so it was actually mindlessly fucking.
(She was a virgin. She still is.)
But the last notations were legally airtight, and it meant she got quite a bit. The house, for starters -- but that was just his way of making sure she would receive the contents. She couldn't work with his sanctum: such were generally personal, and their views of magic were too far apart to try. But the books, his research notes, the little curiosities which he'd acquired over the years, those were hers now. Anything which had been touched by the supernatural.
It took her some time to sort through it all, nearly as much before she stopped crying. And then the tears came back when she found the gift.
She didn't know where he'd gotten it, how much he'd had to offer up just to get the little necklace. But he'd already wrapped it in holiday paper, planted a note to himself as a reminder to make sure it was given well before Christmas. (He'd already seen her go through one Christmas, watched her slide into a depression which took weeks to lift. December would do that to her until the world ended, and there would soon be an extra reason for her very soul to feel cold.)
It couldn't be recharged, not by her: she didn't have the magic for that, and getting someone else to do it -- that would be nearly impossible. The mages of the state had barely been willing to deal with him: she didn't think they would use his memory as the bridge to connect with her. So once its power had been depleted, that would be it.
But a necklace which suppressed resonance... a guarantee that for a few days, she would be normal...
There was an envelope in the box. Airline tickets.
She didn't know what he'd given up, freely offered of himself. Just so she could go home for Christmas.
The woman had called her family. (Her mother had picked up, and both had eventually spent most of the conversation jabbering in that language, because they were just that excited.) Let them know she was coming home. Not to worry about her, because she could take the train from the airport (she'd prepared a lie about why she was able to use the airport) and just walk up to the building. But that was when her father was put on the line, and of course he was worried because gangs. Forget the train, forget the state of a car which mostly ran on prayer, he was going to pick her up and...
She loved them. (They had meant well, and there had been no one else to love.) She was going to see her parents, her sister and brother. She packed carefully, sorted out clothes first and her stories last, arranged for a taxi pickup because while she'd been left a car, she didn't have a license.
Then luck happened, with all of it bad.
The taxi was nearly an hour late. That let them get caught in traffic. The driver had declared he knew a shortcut, and that had gotten them lost. He'd then told her that he was charging extra for the time sacrificed to the shortcut (he felt free to say that, because she was trying the necklace out) and that had put them into a fight, one which had been distracting enough that he'd rear-ended the car in front of him and...
...it took two hours of something very close to outright begging before the airline would change the ticket for the missed flight, along with the payment of a penalty fee. She'd used one of the pay phones (because an airport was one of the last places to find one), got her sister and told her what had happened. The pickup time was changed accordingly, and she sat in the airport to wait. Nearly fell asleep several times, passed out on the plane, got groped by the passenger next to her and that got her up in a hurry, no one believed her about that and she nearly wound up being detained at Dulles until, still fuming, she agreed to drop the matter entirely. She couldn't even get her laptop out in time for a minor jinx which she knew was wrong, stomped her way to the newest bank of phones when doing so did nothing more than hurt her, called home to let them know she was in at last and the police picked up.
At the station, they told her it had been quick. They said there hadn't been anything more than a few gunshots at the end of the gang's drug-induced home invasion. No torture. Certainly no rapes. They lied to her in every way for hours, unaware of the minor bit of magic which let her detect each one. Ultimately, just about the only true thing they told her was that her family was dead. And one of them, perhaps thinking it was a comfort, noted the luck of her missed flight, because if not for that, she would have been right there with them. Wasn't it fortunate that...
She'd found herself looking at that officer's throat. (The woman often went for the neck, because cutting off the airway was one of the few methods of killing which allowed a skilled practitioner to change their mind at the last second.)
She thought about magic. She didn't have that much of it yet and with enough preparation time, advance planning, some thought as to both script and scenery, it was still enough to set the stage for a massacre.
She asked questions, listened to lies. This included the one about how even though the gang had completely gotten away, the police felt this was important enough to risk war with them and actually chase them down for once. After all, families being killed was important and, as she found out when she checked various forms of media later, it was so important that it had very nearly been written about.
She got into the apartment (which took a few rotes) and looked at the shaky words on the kitchen wall. It was just barely legible. The teenager who'd put it there hadn't been all that literate and in any case, a spleen was hardly an ideal writing instrument.
She'd checked herself into a hotel. (She would stay in the area for a few days, paying bills and settling final accounts. All the way through Christmas.) And then she'd done the only thing she could do.
She made a few phone calls. Reached out to connections which another had possessed. Told those of her Tradition about what had happened, and softly asked for a chance at justice. For she could not act, not when it was her own family, not when she hadn't been there to directly defend them (and probably would have died with them, sometime after the fourth round of rapes). She could only... make a suggestion.
She had dreams not of assassination, but of murder. Dreams she never acted upon.
There had been eight who'd broken into what had once been her cell, broken into prison. (It would, she told herself, have taken at least three to overpower her father.) Five would escape. And as far as the woman knew, they remained free until the end of the world.
They arrived in the internment camp's gatehouse: the hollow structure meant to be nothing more a place for the receiving end of such journeys. Bree took a breath, reoriented herself: the more conventional form of teleportation had always been jarring. Looked down and to the right --
-- and the unicorn vanished, right out from under her palm.
Figures.
It left her opening a door where the grip hadn't been meant for humans, stepping out under half-familiar constellations and waxing Moon. Those few who'd been in the vicinity turned at the sound, looked to see who'd just emerged. Five humans, one patrolling earth pony who had a blue-haired girl following him at exceptionally close range.
They were staring at her. All of them were staring at her.
It had been months -- moons, it might as well be moons now -- since her undercover assignment. Since she'd said goodbye. She was surprised to discover she remembered most of the names, although the blue-haired girl was new. The thin girl with heterochromia, the mismatched colors of her eyes already starting to sparkle with moisture under starlight, that was Laurie...
"Oh, god," that one said. "Oh my god... Bree..."
She was trying to think of something she could say back when the hug hit her.
It froze her. She didn't know how to deal with hugs. She didn't get hugged. Her parents hadn't done it very often, with her father completely stopping once puberty began, her mother dropping out less than a year later. She didn't have the kind of relationships which led to hugging. She didn't have a body which lent itself to hugging: the contact either came from an awkward angle or tried to compress. She hadn't been hugged in...
"You're -- cushy."
"Cushy," she'd repeated on the last tolerably-warm day of late November.
"But you don't really lean in --"
"-- I can't --"
"-- and you're still all soft and warm." Which was when Allyse had giggled.
"Why are we doing this?" asked the girl, already anticipating some very confusing dreams.
"Because you should be more of a hugger. You don't touch people enough."
"I'm not good at --"
"-- you'll get better." Pulled back enough to look up at her. "I know you can get better."
Her arms were limp at her sides. She couldn't move. She only felt the smaller female, whose head was down, sobbing into her blouse.
"-- oh god, Bree, oh god, you... you're alive, they brought the girls in and then they said you were alive, you're alive, they're all dead and you're --"
This went on for a while, without much variety in the words. Most of the others in the vicinity just watched it happen.
Most.
"A world of sin," declared the dark-skinned woman with the puff of hair that blended into the night, the perpetual anger having found another target, "paid the price it should have paid long ago. And one of those sins thinks she escaped judgment." With open satisfaction, "There should be no pity for the damned. The only regret is that the work has to wait for completion..."
Joanna.
Joanna, from a world where church and state weren't even separated by 'and.' The former resident of a theocracy. Someone who knew she was in the right, and the mere act of asking questions consigned the soul to hellfire.
Laurie lifted her head away from Bree's shoulder.
"Shut the fuck up."
"Why?" Joanna smugly inquired. "Isn't this what free speech gets you? Allowing the words of humans instead of the Word of God? I can say whatever I like, and you just have to listen --"
Several small rocks levitated their way out of the grass, and did so without the surrounding hue of a unicorn field.
"Shut," Laurie slowly repeated, "the fuck up. A world is dead --"
"-- they got what they deserved," Joanna stated, tone all too close to a purr. "All but four. And their time is coming. You know what happens if you fight me in front of a pony, twisted. You don't want the cells --"
"-- if she fights you in front of me," that pony said, "then I wasn't here."
It made Joanna look at him.
"Centurion," with the word abruptly urgent. "There are rules --"
But he only said something which everyone said to Joanna eventually, and then he trotted away. (The blue-haired girl followed, staying close.) It wasn't quite enough for someone who believed herself protected by the divine, and generally in spite of all previous evidence.
"The mixing of the races," she declared, "is punishable by stoning. The soulless child produced by sin shall be put to the fire --"
She and her cries of pain both eventually got out of range, and long before Laurie ran out of little stones.
The telekinetic, the one who'd come through the virus which ravaged her world with a little more than she'd started with, disengaged from the hug. Stepped back a little, looked up at Bree.
"I didn't see her. If I knew she was there --"
"-- it doesn't matter." Very little seemed to.
"You don't even look angry. You don't look like --"
"-- I'm... tired, Laurie. I'm just..." Her shoulders slumped, curled in. "...tired."
Long fingers closed around her left wrist, started to lead her off. "We've got a bunk for you. Not a house yet: the construction is behind. There's been a bunch of -- well, you'll meet them. And we just got the girls... they want to see you, Bree, they've been asking about you for a week. At least, Aashita has. It's hard to figure out some of what Shanu says. But they need to see you, to know you're all right. I can wake them up --"
"-- let them sleep." Someone should sleep. Those who still could. And to simply see her might bring back nightmare.
"And --"
She knew what name was coming next, and could not stand to hear it.
"Does he know?"
Laurie didn't answer immediately. The words didn't come until after she'd led Bree past a fully-distracted Japanese youth, who'd been caught in the middle of an open argument with his right hand.
"He knows what we were told," she finally said. "That it's... gone. But Princess Luna didn't say how, and I don't think she knew. We've been trying to keep the girls from finding out, and even Joanna's stayed away because..." Her scant lips contorted into a snarl. "I don't think we could do anything which would put us in the cells, if she decided she just had to tell the kids. And I think she actually figured that out for once. But Jake --"
It wasn't as if she could have kept from hearing the name again forever. Celestia had said it, and now...
She... hadn't been thinking about him. Bree imagined that she should have been feeling some guilt over that, but there had been a number of other things to think about. Six total days unconscious also meant less time available for thinking, period. And when it came to feeling anything...
"-- he's mostly been quiet. Ben can't even get through to him. He told us he just needed some time, and then he told us he was waiting for you. He comes out of his house, he does his usual patrols next to the ponies, but he doesn't really talk to anyone. The most he's said was to ask for a lot of paper and some quills. He had to write some things down."
"That's how some people work out what they're feeling --"
"-- he said," Laurie interrupted, "he had to write down the entire final season of Social Justice Cretins. Because no one else could."
Bree blinked, and didn't find another sentence until Laurie had taken her past a crooked house.
"A bunk."
"You need to sleep --"
"Roommates?"
"There's two other women in there right now. If you feel comfortable talking to them --"
"Put me in the dining hall," Bree quietly said. "I scream a lot."
She left college. Dropped out, really. There was nothing left for her there, and no one. Some might have found it strange that she continued to study engineering on her own, further branched out into electronics while keeping up in computer studies. But a little science never hurt with magic: it's easier to create a coincidence when you know what can break. And she was an engineering student once, part of her has never stopped longing for it, and... the books were available.
But she also studied magic, and did so on her own. It's hard to change mentors, impossible to find anyone willing to take her on. There was also only so much she could do with the inherited library, especially when trying to make it work with her own theories. It sent her in some strange directions, gave her an unusual style -- but she advanced quickly.
Still, few people brought her referrals, and she felt like she wasn't hearing enough voices on the wind. She felt like she could be doing more, and so she sold the house. It didn't take long to find an appropriately gang-infested neighborhood in Detroit, and it took weeks to redo all the wiring in her new place just so she could make breakfast without blacking out the neighborhood.
The woman was more active now, and her count gradually began to rise. Still, given how long she'd been at it, the duration for which she'd survived, it could be seen as unusually low. She was finding a number of cases where things could be fixed without killing. She carefully studied the realm of the wraiths, learned more than most. She read and she worked and she had nightmares and she took showers which had to be timed and she was seen as just another Euthie, a serial killer on the perpetual prowl for the next excuse. Her resonance had reached the point where she couldn't be around normal people for long (and she was still a year away from getting control of it), making supernatural contacts risked death, and while there were other mages in Detroit, all of them had preemptively decided to hate her.
She didn't have a friend in the world. Just a lonely house with a workshop in the basement, where she sometimes tried to figure out ways to teleport which wouldn't involve the correspondence sphere. She wasn't meant to run for long, and she needed some reliable means of escape. One which wasn't just sending herself into another layer of reality, because there always seemed to be someone who could follow. There had to be a way...
And then she had an idea.
And then it didn't quite work.
And then there were ponies.
And then her count...
She'd left the dining hall before Sun had been raised. Quite a bit before: when it came to eating together (and some of the little houses had tiny kitchens, but not all), the humans cooked for themselves, and so she had to be out of there before the first pots and pans began to rattle. She wasn't much for rose petal salad anyway.
The internment camp -- she couldn't think of it any other way -- was mostly familiar. It should have been: she'd spent a week within its boundaries before. But there were new buildings. A playground was coming along nicely. The future library...
...actually, that needed some work. The foundation didn't look good, that one arch was all wrong, and she didn't know what idiot had chosen pine for the boards, but --
-- it didn't matter.
As far as she could tell, she'd woken up before anyone else. But not anypony else: there were always patrols, and a pegasus cautiously flapped up to her. A quiet question gained a surprisingly fast answer, and then she was back at the playground.
There were rough attempts at picnic tables scattered around the perimeter, and a grill which would probably never know anything more than peppers: after all, steaks and lamb chops were acts of murder. It was theoretically possible for the occupants to try the griffon route, consuming the meat of non-sapient monsters -- but no one knew how that would react with human biology, and so the ponies hadn't let anyone try.
Bree looked up at the fading night sky or rather, the dome of the shield. It had a soft glow to it, a blue which didn't quite match that of Equestria's daytime atmosphere. Added to approaching Sun, it was actually enough to read by.
Or write.
She placed the first piece of paper on the table. Dipped the quill. There was an awkward moment spent in trying to figure out how to get rid of excess ink, and the wood acquired a dark stain.
The title came first.
Our Great Works
Followed by, with what might almost have been optimism,
Volume One
There was more than monsters. There were people. Some of them told stories...
Mind: not her best sphere. She could shield herself, and a little more -- but not too much. Still... she knew it was possible to enhance her memory, at least for a little while. Short-term perfect recollection of anything she'd ever seen. Her world had produced monsters and manipulation and endless death, but there had been stories. There was a chance that some of them were unique. In her week within the camp, she'd learned that one way to determine point of origin was literature. But it wasn't completely reliable: so many worlds seemed to have a Lewis Carroll of their very own. However, she still didn't know what a G.R.R. Martin was, or why anyone was waiting for him to finish something: just that David had said that if the longest resident spent all but the last three minutes of his life in Equestria and then got home, he still wouldn't have to worry about missing the next book.
Start with... what did that elective always say was great? Russian literature. Try that.
She wrote down something which felt as if it could have been a title.
Focus...
Code flowed. It took a while, without the tablet.
Anna... Karenina. I got it right. So. Just to test. First paragraph...
The quill didn't move.
First paragraph.
Her memory had been sharpened: she knew that. She could remember anything she wished, as clearly as she might desire.
But she couldn't remember what she'd never known.
...it's a title. She mentioned a title and I remembered it. I was curious, so I picked up the book from the library, and I never got to read it because that was the week when the ravens went nuts, and then that one took on human shape and I had to find gold to fight it with before it took my eyes out --
There was a late fee. And I didn't check it out again because he was dead and my family was dead and --
She released the rote, and did so just a little too late. Put the quill down.
I mostly read fiction when I was a kid. Stuff for children, what little the library had of it. Dylan wanted me to expand my horizons, but there was always one more textbook or diagram of sphere interactions, or he'd want me to observe on a mission, or I'd just have class. And after he died...
...I didn't really watch television.
I didn't read much that wasn't studying.
I've been to three movies in my life. One of those was a charity ticket raffle where I forgot to lose, and two of them were following a target through multiple theaters.
I...
...I know about Danny Dunn.
I know the Three Investigators. Jack McGurk.
I know every book they assigned us in high school and college. Most of the high school ones were at least fifty years old.
I know how to kill six people in three minutes, then wipe all evidence of my presence from the room before I get out using the route I'd planned two weeks earlier.
There were centuries of history. What must have been millions of stories written down. People chronicling their lives on paper, and then billions of people trying to do it online.
Gone.
Just about everything they wrote down is gone.
There's me, who never really read any of it. Two girls, too young to have read much of anything. And Jake, who's...
What was Social Justice Cretins?
Who was the last president? She knew that. Name all of them. Bringing back the rote would allow it.
Why would anyone care?
Our history, everything we did, anything we created... none of it stopped what happened. The things we did may have led to it, and...
...who won Best Actress three years ago?
Which celebrities were involved in the scandal that was on the front cover of every supermarket rag for the whole summer?
Who sang that stupid thing that was mostly somebody else's backbeat? The one which was on every station until people decided it was about assault and pulled it?
She knew, because every answer was the same.
Dead people.
Dylan made a joke once. The way the other Traditions expect us...
...me...
(There were no other Traditions.)
...to respond to anything. "Death is the answer. Now what was the question?"
What was the recipe for Irish stew? Death.
(There was no Ireland.)
How tall is the Pentex Tower? Death.
(The stock market could be said to have crashed.)
What time is it? Death. How do you get to the Metro from here? Death. How do you think the Redskins are going to do this season? Well, the answer to that one was always death, so no change there...
She giggled. Picked up the quill again.
Caul births: roughly one in eighty thousand. Medical studies confirmed.
Virginal breast hypertrophy: no real studies, estimates only, solely affects females. May be one in every hundred thousand.
Mages: again, estimates only. When including the Technocracy, with guesses towards those who are never found: globally, possibly four per million.
Survivors: ...
Well, that one was easy.
...one in (roughly: no final count available) every 1,750,000,000.
Who were those seven billion people? What were their names? What did they dream of?
Doesn't matter, because they're all dead.
She didn't really notice when she tipped the inkpot over onto the paper, staining it beyond all hope of legibility. Her hands pushed against the table as she stood up. Strode across the playground, feet landing harder than they should have.
It hurt. But everything did.
The shield went partway into the earth. She could see where the energy sliced into soil, and had never seen a casting which worked that way. Her first suspicion was that somepony had dug out the narrow trench first, and then the caster had anchored the lowest portions of the dome within it. It meant there was only so far down the thing could go, and she wondered if any of the occupants had tried to dig their way out.
She wouldn't. She didn't have to. It was just magic. Force. Energy. She had mastered entropy. Weakening energy would be easy. The working would probably pick up the attempt, might alert the caster while diverting some power to where she was operating, but... by her estimates, all she needed for a human-sized hole was to want it badly enough. She could leave at any time. Walk out into the wild zone. The nearest town was closer than anyone suspected: supplies could be picked up there or rather, stolen. The border...
...it doesn't matter.
She touched the shield. The energy played against the fading scar, and her hand felt like it was falling asleep.
Footsteps. Coming up behind her. Someone planting with extra force, making sure she heard them. She didn't turn around.
It doesn't matter.
"I want to make something clear," the dark man said.
She didn't turn.
"I know what the stories are. What we're supposed to do in this situation." He snorted. "It's not happening. You're too goddamn tall, you're nowhere near black enough because there isn't a single bit of Africa in whatever the hell wound up as you and I'm just that much of a racist to want my own shade first, plus your tits are way too fucking big and I'm pretty sure that if we tried to repopulate the species with you on top, you'd be too heavy and could kill me just by leaning in --"
He'd stopped, right behind her. Moving and talking.
"...Bree?"
She didn't look at him. Kept her hand against the shield.
"I was kind of expecting you to hit me by now."
So she did.
She couldn't run, she could never run for long, she couldn't run and she couldn't teleport and she didn't have enough forces or life magic to fly, she could never get away and when you couldn't get away, you had to fight. She hit him and she hit him and she left herself open, made sure there were holes in her defense that anyone could spot, much less a New World Order agent who would recognize that there was no real defense at all and she went for his weak areas, his vulnerable spots, striking just a little away from the fatal places, making him think he was in a fight for his life and there was only one thing he could do and
he didn't do it.
She was hitting him over and over and he just took it. A particularly solid punch knocked him backwards, and she shouldered into him, put him into the grass, dropped her knees into his stomach and just kept hitting him and he wasn't
he was supposed to
She hesitated, and it let him grab her wrists.
"No!" Sitting up, pushing her off with sheer leverage, still keeping hold of her arms. "I know what you're doing! It's not going to --"
"-- you won!" she screamed. "Perfect order, perfect control, perfect death! No stray thoughts, no wrong dreams! One Tech, one Trad, and you won! This is what you're supposed to do, this is what we were both born to do, I died to do this, everyone died and I can't I can't I can't I --"
He was starting to push her backwards, which would put her back into the grass. They weren't all that far off in height: he probably outmassed her, she had gotten more of a chance for regular workouts. But she didn't have leverage and he was pushing her backwards, his sunglasses were slipping, she saw brown eyes and then he let her go.
There was some momentum, and so she fell the rest of the way on her own. Didn't move.
He flopped down next to her. About two feet away.
"They have some great dental potions here," Jake told the air. "You probably knew that. What you didn't know is that Aurora -- you haven't met her yet, she came in the moon after you went back -- was both vain and dumb enough to break into the ponies' first aid kit after she chipped a tooth during the ballgame which she stooped to play in, next to us commoners. Guess what? Turns out it's safe for humans. Works on anything with teeth."
He spit out the bicuspid.
"Which is why --" the next glob was just blood "-- I'm not as mad as I could be. Christ, Bree..."
"Kill me."
The words had barely been audible, even to herself.
"No."
Softly, "You're supposed to --"
"-- the war's over. Game called on account of stadium loss." A little more quietly. "And players, and spectators, and my brother. My dad died when I was sixteen. My mom, two years before I got here. My older brother went to this tiny town in South Carolina... you've probably never heard of it. Ninety-Six. That's the actual goddamn no-joke name. And he runs the church --"
Stopped.
"Listen to me," Jake softly said. "Present tense. I know he's dead, and... present tense. I've been wondering how he died. On his knees, probably. Not because he was weak, or bowed down at the last. Stronger than me, Bree. Strong enough that he could still put hope in God. I think that if he had time... the last thing he would have done was pray."
They lay in the grass, simultaneously together and separate.
"...there's this theory about ascension," Bree eventually began.
He automatically snorted -- and then made a strange sound, one which registered as having made some effort to pull the first one back. "Oh, we're going there... So tell me."
"It says our avatars -- the other parts of our souls -- are fragments of angels. Little bits of a god. So when we study magic, when we're trying to transcend what we are... we were just trying to reunite with that god."
Grass rustled as he nodded, looked through the shield towards rising Sun. "I've heard it." Paused. "Don't ask where."
An interrogation room, probably. "And I was wondering... why? Why would anyone want to become part of what watched our world and just -- watched. Just... let it all happen. I think about that kind of god, and... all I hear is laughter. Like it wanted this all along. That we were created to be tortured, the world was made to end, and all we did was amuse the thing for a few seconds. But now it's over, so it'll create something else, and... start over. Only worse."
It took a while before he spoke again, long enough for light to move across their feet.
"Maybe we got the good bits," the Technocrat proposed. "Maybe there wasn't anything good left after all those fragments came down, and the more of them which made it back, the better it would have been."
"It didn't matter."
"No," Jake agreed. "It didn't."
Sun's light advanced a little more.
"I think you cracked my fucking ribs."
"...sorry."
A ladybug flew into her line of vision. Dropped down, rested on one of the red strands which had fallen across her face.
They have ladybugs here.
So much is different, and there's still ladybugs.
Maybe that was true everywhere. Ladybugs: the universal constant.
It opened the back of its shell. Tiny wings unfurled, and it flew away.
"You're cursing a lot."
"Because you cracked my, and I repeat, fucking ribs."
"What was your brother's name?"
"Moses -- no, really. My parents had a really bad case of religion when he was born, and he never got over the virus." One dark hand casually waved in front of his bleeding face. "Don't land on me, hardshell. Bree -- I talked to the kids. It wasn't easy. They didn't want to even get near me at first, and then the older one -- Aashita -- finally approached. Real slow. And she said it didn't hurt to be near me. She was surprised by that. I have no idea what it means and she didn't explain it. I think she was cursing a lot. Mostly in Hindi. Eight years old, she designs like a college student on a bender and she curses like a sailor on the morning after one." Paused. "Weird kid. But... she told me what happened, as far as she understood it. She's a bright kid, but... it wasn't much."
She knew what was coming.
"You don't want to hear this."
"No," he agreed. "I don't. Any more than you want to say it."
"I already told the Princesses --"
"-- and they're not going to tell me." A deep breath. "It's going to hurt, Bree. It'll hurt more than anything I can imagine. You want to win the war? Fire the last shot. Tell me what happened."
"I don't know. The Internet went down. Television was next. There were things happening all over the world, and I couldn't track any of them down before the blackout was locked in. All I know is what I saw..."
Experienced. Felt. Did.
"Then tell me."
The dark hand touched her palm, a finger traced the fading line, and the contact was so much like a shock.
"Because there's no one else," Jake softly said. "There won't ever be anyone else. Please, Bree. Just... tell me."
She closed green eyes, and the sky went black.
It could have been day. It might have been night. It no longer mattered, because there was no sun.
It wasn't just the dark clouds, blackness which roils and twists without ever lifting. There is a time when what little light exists is more of a sickly dark grey, and another when she can't even get that. Shadows are everywhere. Some of them seem to be flowing through the air, and wherever they move, there is no light. She's been carrying torches, actual torches whenever she can, because electricity doesn't seem to be operating very well. There are flashlights aplenty, because not many people thought to loot those. But the batteries don't work. (Her tablet is still functional, but the primary power source is something other than electromagnetic.)
So it's flame. And the smoke curled down, went into her lungs no matter what the wind was like. She can't do much about that, because people did loot the gas masks. And if she looks up...
...the woman doesn't do much of that. Because even with the clouds, the smoke and shadows, there's still one thing visible in the sky and she can't look at it. She knows that on the level of her soul. If she looks at it, and it sees her...
There was no sun. And she alone among all the living souls of her world, (she would never believe the number, might have broken right there if she'd known) thinks The Nightmare won.
But that world had only one nightmare. Hers has so many more.
She held the torch aloft. The contact lenses which give her low-light vision will work, but others might see the flame. She knows that could mean attack. But attack would mean something alive to attack, and...
The woman isn't entirely sure where she is. How long it's been.
(It couldn't have been more than ten days. She's almost sure of that.)
She's been on foot. The cars stopped working, she's not meant for bicycles, she can't teleport and she can't fly and... she walked. It means she's probably still in Michigan. But she can't tell where in the state. After Detroit fell to the blaze, after she got past those using the final collapse as an excuse to finally remove her --
add three
-- she should have been able to follow the roads. But the tablet's map is a conventional one. All GPS systems are gone. And when she tries to pull up the overlay, it flickers. Sometimes the ground flickers, just before it contorts. It happened beneath her and she nearly fell into a crevice. A building which was two miles away (when it was still possible to see that far) is reached in five minutes: a door ten feet away requires an hour. The world is buckling, and it means she could be anywhere.
Anywhere at all.
There is a book she has never read, one she will only be told about after the world has ended. That book had an ending of its own, and the writer noticed something: that in any apocalypse which isn't instant and global, there are clearly those who are the first to die. But if someone has to be first... then someone else has to be last.
She didn't know how many were already dead. She just knew she wasn't. And it had taken so much to get that far: she'd survived because of Detroit's mages, she was strongest, the quickest thinker, and... because she could kill.
(She had gone to the cabal looking for help. Her presence provided those whose reactions had reached the level of cornered rats something to blame and in the end, she got out just ahead of the flame. She heard Amber Thistledown's final scream. She has heard so many screams. And now she's been listening for screams, just because it would mean someone is left to scream.)
Over and over, the dying world tried to kill her. The Chodana had never been shy about self-defense, and so her count rose.
There was a sign up ahead. She got closer, lifted the torch. Shadows swept around the flame, nearly put it out. There was just enough to see letters...
She squinted, tried to focus. Nothing changed. It was still a street sign, and there were letters on it. But they were in no language she knows. No language anything living had ever known.
Forward. It was as good a direction as any.
She tended to the flame as she trudged through the ash. Stumbled, caught herself against a half-melted car, and found another body. Shrunken in on itself, as if all fluids had been drained away at the moment of death -- but the wrinkles produced by that effect bulge out. Place post-mortem in a hot tub
(there's barely any warmth to the air)
until the skin absorbed moisture like the sole of an oversoaked foot... it shouldn't happen that way, and yet that's exactly what it looked like. Convolutions and agony.
And pores. Every pore on the body was at least five times its normal size.
Just like the last two hundred corpses.
She was desperate to call out, and terrified to think of what might call back.
-- a sound, a screech, something which had never been produced by a human throat. But it's a living sound, it comes from somewhere overhead and that meant the possibility of attack, so she looked up and
she sees the red star
and it sees her
it's in her head
it's in her head and there isn't room for her anymore
its thoughts are too big
I knOW yOu
you think YOU're my SANITY
the web
the pain
THE BREAKING
broken
broKeN
NotICed woRld nOTicEd
SUbstitutions
FAKES
TrYing to FIX things
...I remember
I see you
I feel you
I remember how it was
to be like you
AND I'LL BREAK THE WORLD TO NEVER REMEMBER THAT AGAIN
...she was on hands and knees. The torch had fallen onto a dead lawn. Black blades refused to catch. And she vomited, over and over. Solids first, the few things she could find which were safe. Liquids next. Dry heaves. She vomited until it seemed that organs had to follow. But the fall had broken contact --
-- no. That wasn't it. Something had happened, somewhere else. She'd felt it -- turn away. Taking care of something more important.
It had gone through her shields as if they weren't there. It had been in her mind for perhaps a hundredth of a second. And when the vomiting finally stopped, she fell to her side and lay on the cold fragments of the sidewalk for a full hour, waiting for it to come back. Waiting, wishing to die.
(The deepest shadows swirled around her. Didn't quite make contact. That attention also had to be focused.)
But death didn't come. And without death, there was still duty.
She got up. Staggered on, her feet shuffling through the corpses of birds and squirrels. They had to fall somewhere.
Find someone who's still alive.
Find out what's happening.
Find a way to stop --
So much of her knew it was too late. But there are times when the most hopeless of dreams are the last thing to die.
This was... a suburb? A small town? It was hard to tell. The fire had been here too, and all the shells had started to look alike long ago. It was possible that the buckling had carried her in a circle and she was back in her own neighborhood. She would know if she saw a familiar corpse...
...there was a house.
She wondered if her mind had broken. Then she considered that if that had happened, she would reasonably expect to see something much more interesting than a reasonably intact house. On the other hand (or under one of the other hooves, depending on location), when the world was at this level of madness, insanity might mean perceiving something sane...
A split-level, and she could see a hint of half-sunken basement. The lawn was ash, the garden twisted into black skeletons. Paint had bubbled from the heat. Some of the windows were broken. But this house, alone among all the others, was still intact enough to be a house.
There could be people inside.
She nearly tried to push the thought away. There was a point when hope and madness were effectively identical, and she wasn't sure if she'd passed it days ago.
Or supplies. She'd just vomited up everything she'd eaten. She had to find food, water which her magic could purify. Without her lost canteen, that qualified as vulgar -- but it was the choice to hurt now in order to suffer that much longer.
The air rippled. Words moved through it, formed in currents of wisps and shadow.
Five hundred.
Four hundred and ninety-nine.
Dissipated.
She looked for a source, saw none, felt less. Focused on the house. It had to have been magic which kept it so intact, or -- well, some other kind of supernatural power, because she had just registered something. But it wasn't a mage's spell. It felt like...
...it felt like waking up from a dream with the best idea of her life, only she'd just woken up and so the dream was fading, she concentrated, thought about the same thing over and over but it just kept slipping and
let me wake up
She pushed on the door, and very little happened. Her guess was that it had been barricaded from the inside.
One of the picture windows, however, was just large enough.
The woman was exceptionally careful, getting in through the broken glass. Her mind felt half-broken. She didn't need to have her body follow.
"I'm not here to hurt you!" she called out into the living room (Intact, it was mostly intact...) "I'm looking for survivors! I'm trying to --"
-- help.
The word choked her, both voice and mind.
It had been days. (Eleven? Twelve?) She had already found... not the living, really. Not that they were capable of knowing that. Not that they knew anything other than the lines of acid which had been stitched into their skin.
She'd... given what help she could.
"-- find people! Please, come out, I won't..."
No answer.
"...please..."
And she knew.
She had been around so much death. Caused so much. Something happened to the air when fresh corpses were present. Outside, it had been everywhere, impossible to pin down. In here...
They're downstairs.
She knew that. Multiple bodies. Maybe a few hours old.
Too late.
She was too late.
There had been living beings here hours ago and she was too late.
If I'd gotten up...
...if I'd been faster...
She had to see her failure.
It didn't take long for the woman to find the stairs leading down. The light was something of a clue. A glow coming from beneath the door frame, soft white, seemingly being created by the air itself. She watched it long enough for a single lumen to slip away, then put the torch out.
This door wasn't barricaded. It wasn't even locked. She put a hand on the banister, went down the stairs, moving as silently as she could. A few wisps of shadows followed.
And of course she was right. They were in the basement. All seven of them.
The bodies were lying in a roughly circular pattern. Four males, three females. The oldest appeared to be no more than thirty. They had fallen in their places around what had once been a rather basic man-cave, one which declared allegiance to teams better known for penalties than victories, and she... couldn't tell what had killed them. There were some bruises on the bodies and the largest was displaying a broken right arm, but there were no mortal wounds.
Poison was a possibility. A suicide pact: we eat together, and we go out together. It would make trusting any food she found impossible. Except that...
...there was an emerald in the center of the circle.
It was unusually large. Amazingly perfect along the outer facets, to the point where it almost could have been Equestrian, and she wondered if one of her own stones had somehow made it here. It was also broken into five rough pieces.
It's what they used to create the protection? She didn't know. Outside of the wraiths, when it came to the abilities of the other supernaturals, she was most familiar with what she'd survived.
But they were dead. And there were things on the floor around the bodies. A fallen barstool. An old Nerf gun. A short length of rope. One freshly-baked loaf of French bread --
-- she stared at it.
Two hundred and eighty-four, spelled out the wisps. Two hundred and eighty-three.
Bread.
It looked soft. The crust was lightly cracked, as if someone had just pressed on it to check for the crackle of perfection. She knew what that sounded like. Her mother had been a cook...
If it's poisoned...
But there wasn't a single bite missing. And if it was poisoned... if it came down to it, if there was nothing left -- there were worse ways to go out than with a stomach full of fresh bread.
She carefully knelt down. Turned slightly sideways as to clear the usual obstruction, stretched her left hand --
"OW!"
It couldn't have been helped. People who'd just pressed their palm onto something that sharp often yelped. And now she was bleeding, she was bleeding because the bread had cut her, fresh-baked madness and --
-- she heard the whimper.
"...no!"
Her head almost whipped to the right. A narrow door, something which might lead into a closet. Another room. A voice...
"Hello?"
No answer. She slowly got straightened up, began to move forward as her gashed palm dripped blood across carpet and corpses.
Please. Please don't let me be hearing things. Please...
Was it prayer? It couldn't be. What existed which was worth praying to? Not in this world, and in the other...
They're alive. They're the strongest beings I've ever seen. (She did her best not to think about the red star.) But they're alive. They aren't gods. I can't pray to them. And even if I could, they would never hear me. She might as well pray to Sun and Moon, for all that mattered. Invoke them, as a pony would.
Sun and Moon, please let there be someone...
She'd already been desperate. Now she also felt stupid.
Forward, failing to notice the deepest shadows as they spiraled in towards her wounded hand.
The right one went onto the doorknob. She turned it, pulled the door outwards.
The first child rushed forward and hit her in the right thigh with a five-pound dumbbell.
There was a surprising amount of force behind it, enough to stagger her. But she used that, allowed herself to drop, got her hands on the girl's shoulders, pressed her back as the woman's blood stained the dirty blouse, then got the dumbbell away.
"Stop! I'm not going to hurt you! I'm --"
But the girl (Asiatic Indian, no more than eight or nine, dark brown skin and an oddly-pointed nose) was still flailing, punching at her with everything she had. And then she saw the other girl, perhaps four, at the back of the little closet, tucked up into the fetal position, softly sobbing...
"-- I'll let you hit me," the woman softly said. "If it matters. But I won't hurt you. I'm trying to help."
It got her cursed at, and she didn't know Hindi.
"Let me guess," she proposed. "You just called me a bitch?"
"YES!" And the older girl blinked. "Um -- I -- let go!" Still flailing, and the little punches were starting to hurt. "Let go, you're the bad thing, you're one of the bad things, you're --"
-- and stopped.
"-- you don't hurt," she said. "Nothing about you hurts. And you smell like..." That pointed nose wrinkled. "You smell like someone who touched a dream."
The woman didn't understand. But the girl had stopped hitting her.
"Come out, Shanu," the older girl softly called. "She's... I think she's safe..."
The younger slowly uncurled.
One hundred and seventeen, said the fainter wisps.
"You're a pony," the smaller girl said, face tight with concentration as she forced herself forward. "You look like a pony."
The woman, who was just straightening up again, froze.
The older groaned. "Shanu, not now..."
"But she does! She looks like a pony! You can't see it? Like she's been around ponies so much that there's something pony around her, all the time! And --"
That was when the younger saw her hand.
"-- the shadows want your blood."
It had been a statement. Something purely matter-of-fact. An observation.
The woman turned, and saw the true darkness.
Shadows were pouring down the staircase, snuffing out the light which had come from the air itself. They hovered around her bleeding palm. They sniffed out the drops which had fallen, saturated itself within them, left nothing behind. Ignored the bodies, for fresh blood was what they wished for, and there was so little of that left.
She had bled. It had focused attention, and so the undead shadows had come for her. Come in the name of the endless hunger. The craving which said that it could drink forever and there would always be more. Use the world until it used it up, something so close now, something it was incapable of understanding. There were all kinds of endings, and the nightmares were incapable of waking onto themselves.
It was hungry and it killed. When it had killed everything, it would still be hungry. And it would blame everything else for having been so weak as to die.
More and more flowed in. It filled half the room now.
(She had no way of knowing it filled the entire peninsula.)
It made a sound. A language the woman had never heard, and a word which could only have one meaning.
MINE.
It went for her palm, and her reaction was instinctive. There was no time left for coincidence, and she was facing something which was its own kind of vulgarity. Pain wracked her body, shocks went through her skin, but the dark purple glow of purest entropy came forth (something it had taken years to summon again) and where the shadows touched it, they fell apart. Infused with chaos, disordered into nothing.
She had hurt it. But the wound was on a scale so small that she would have had to slice fractions for hours just to approximate it.
But there was also nothing that which thought of itself as absolute power hated so much as being hurt.
KILL.
And then three of the deepest shadows stretched for the fresh bloodstain on the older girl's blouse.
Sixty-two, claimed the lighter wisps.
"No." The woman was starting to shake, while the girls were frozen, terrified beyond screams. "You can't have them. You can't. I won't let you..."
In response, more darkness flowed in. Enough to have extra awareness of her. Soon, it would be enough to focus. Act.
She was about to die.
They were all about to die.
I can --
-- I can't.
I've been trying for years and I can't.
I --
-- she was a mage, on the edge of death. And mages, particularly Euthanatoi, were many things when balanced on that final blade.
"Grab onto me." Barrier strength = 3 (Dropping) "Whatever happens, don't let go. No matter what."
There was no answer. But then the older wrapped her arms around the woman's left leg, the younger went for the right.
Shields extending. Barrier strength =1 (Dropping)
She looked directly into the shadows, and did something very human indeed.
"Go fuck yourself," the woman definitively stated.
Mages were many things on the edge of death. For starters, they were strong.
A decimal which had been refusing to admit it was in exactly the wrong place for nearly three years darted to the left. The hole opened. The girls screamed, the trio fell into the Tempest, and the shadows roared, rushed forward, blocked the hole from closing with its endless intangible form as they flowed into the storm, chasing down the very last blood there would ever be.
"I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared I'm --" more Hindi, and the woman wondered what the curses meant "-- I'm scared --"
"Just hang on!"
They were plummeting. Rotating. But it took time, the transition wasn't instant, she'd never traveled with something living before and it seemed to be slowing things down. She glanced back, saw the shadows right behind them, felt the malice, the power which was just beginning to truly focus on her, saw tendrils lash forward, and she put so much of the power which existed in her soul shields into that which she'd placed around the girls, partially diverting it away from her own body to do so.
Within the Tempest, it was just barely enough. The shadows skidded off the children, and only did so because they had met someone who knew the realm better than they, understood its rules. It also only happened because she wasn't fighting off even one percent of the thing yet, and what was left was more than enough to lacerate her legs.
She screamed: there would have been no way of stopping it. But she'd prevented the worst of it, and had no way of knowing that. The blood was but blood: the corruption had been kept out. And there was true blood in the Tempest now, more than had come from her palm, and the shadows slowed, unwilling to let the drops disperse within the endless plasm storm. It meant they were gaining ground.
Keep going keep going keep going
The woman glanced back, saw what was happening. The endless greed and ego, feeling the prize would never get away and so there was time to pick up the scraps before the meal began.
Fine.
Idiot.
"You're hungry?" she shouted. "Eat this!"
She pulled entropy away from her own wounds, made the bleeding more efficient, sent the liquid of her life in all directions. Portions of shadow scattered, trying to get it all.
Seven said something in the Tempest, a final echo of what was happening far away.
We're almost there, we have to be almost there
six
I have to get through and slam the gate
four
before any of this comes through, but we've got a lead, we're ahead and as long as I don't bleed out before we get there, we can make it, we're going to make it, we're going to --
The last faint wisps formed in front of her, kept pace with the tumbling.
Zero.
It didn't leave her enough time to wonder what it meant. She simply found out, to the limited knowledge she would possess. She didn't know what had produced the explosion which was now streaming through the hole. Had no way to realize that it wasn't nuclear (although the touchstone had begun that way, not so far away from where she'd once lived, where her family had died). It was light and it was heat and it burned through the Tempest, it burned the shadows and they were screaming, they were screaming and screaming as hunger was lost in the begging for an end to the pain, the eternal storm was evaporating and the shockwave overtook the place where the shadows had been, the forefront of the power pushed them forward a little faster and there was one last rotation and her feet slammed into marble, a split-second before the tablet slipped from her jacket and did the same. Only harder.
The gate didn't close behind her. The gate was, and then it was not. Rendered into final disorder, as something which could no longer exist.
She staggered: harder to do with a girl clutching each leg. Just barely registered the nature of the surface she was standing on. Wondered just when her blouse and jacket had gotten that wrecked, realized it had probably happened days ago. Looked up and saw two alicorns, which was the most normal thing she'd seen in weeks.
"I --"
She'd been meaning to finish with something like can explain, even though she couldn't.
Instead, she fell, her blood-slick legs slipping free from young arms as she tumbled forward, and the last thing she saw was dark blue lancing out to catch her.
They lay in the pristine green grass for a while, as Sun made its way over them. It wasn't quite the right color when looked at through the shield.
"You're holding my hand," she eventually said.
"For the last hour, yeah."
"Why?"
And there was something familiar about the words. "Because you're human and alive."
"I shouldn't be."
The question was natural. "Which one?"
"Alive." She closed her eyes.
"'A fire has fallen from heaven and burnt up all the livestock, and I alone survived to tell you this...'" Jake said, and she turned just enough to stare at him. "I told you: parents with the religion bug. It's related to the book of Job, I think. Or someone ripped it off from Melville. Maybe the other way around."
She didn't know. Churches were one more place which gangs could shoot up, and her father had preferred to worship at the altar of football.
"Bree," Jake quietly said, "you think I don't know? Seven billion. Seven billion and... I was in the wrong place. Someone in the lab hit the wrong switch, I got a one-way ride, and... I didn't do anything which entitles me to be here. To be breathing. It's lottery odds: everyone loses except for the ones who win. And most of those blow through the money, wind up worse off than they were before they won." Shifted his shoulders a little. "By the way, this is where you get to call that a Tech plot."
"I just thought it was human nature."
"Even worse."
Clouds drifted by. Bree wondered who'd worked on the shapes.
"How do you feel?"
She couldn't lie to him. "Like I want to die."
"Bree --"
Matter-of-fact. The expression of statistics. A number which was much more than its digits. "-- I've killed two hundred and eighteen people."
He rather abruptly let go of her hand.
"Every one of us keeps count," she softly said. "But we don't record them, anywhere but our own heads. We don't go around comparing totals. Put down numbers and someone will see them as a record to be broken. I can say there's people who killed less than I have, and there's others who've killed more. That's all. But for me -- it's two hundred and eighteen. I was at twenty-seven when I started trying to stop incursions. I didn't break two hundred until it all started falling apart. Some of those last ones were self-defense, and some of them were... stopping torture. Only they might have gone on to more torture -- we talked about that last time, and a couple of hours ago. The custody of a god who can't care."
"You don't know that." Sitting up now. Not exactly reaching for her.
She remained on her back. "Why should I believe anything else? I killed two hundred and eighteen people, Jake. Some of them were self defense, some were mercy, some were protecting Equestria, and... some were broken parts in a broken world, who tried to break everything else so they'd fit in better. And I kept thinking... about domino effects. If you could have a cascade failure, then there had to be a cascade success. Somewhere. That it was just a matter of removing the right person, and... things would be better. It would all start to fix itself. But I killed two hundred and eighteen people, with so many of them in the name of saving seven billion. And all I did was make the final slaughter's total a little smaller."
"You're a pretty conceited bitch."
She propped herself up on her elbows so as to look at him more closely, felt her breasts heavily shift as she leaned to one side. "...what?"
The bruises were coming up in interesting colors under the dark skin. "You're making it sound like the end was your fault. Like you're the only one who screwed up, like everything would have been fine if you'd just done something. Every person lost was all about you. Aren't you the one who isn't supposed to take things personally, because that's the way you go insane?"
"...shit," she eventually said, and laid back down. "You were listening..."
"We've had Euthies talk about their code before."
"During interrogation."
Steadfastly, "Yeah. And on the sixth day of their last stay here, probably figuring I was never going home and if I did, you hadn't told me anything we didn't have anyway. You want to die, Bree? I've been thinking about my brother for a week. How he died. That I wasn't there. I don't know anything about what happened, so I can invent any death I like. I can put myself there next to him, equipped with every gadget the Ivory Tower ever produced. I pull out every bit of science, every stunt, I give everything I have for him and... I die. Every time. Everyone else died. Why am I any different?"
He pulled his knees up towards a slow-scabbing chin.
"I'm not," he told her. "I just got lucky. You didn't save seven billion people. Maybe no one could have. You saved two. No one else saved any."
"I know," she calmly told him, "the sound of someone trying to talk me out of this."
"Of dying."
She nodded.
"So if you know what that sounds like," the dark man said, "use some of it on me."
Which was when she fully sat up.
"Because my brother's dead," Jake Pelletier said. "My world is gone. I was stuck here trying to protect these people, I thought maybe I could get home one day, and I lost my fucking world." He slowly took the sunglasses off, and the first tear fell. "Tell me why I'm here, Bree. Tell me why I should still be here. Tell me why I deserve to be lucky."
She didn't say anything for a while. And before she spoke, she reached out to take his hand.
He gripped hers, brown on yellow. Squeezed tightly enough to hurt.
The pain didn't matter. Pain was for the living.
Three hours passed, most of it in speech, and too much in tears. Tears which could never be enough.
Finally, "Did you try to kill Joanna yet?"
"No."
Jake shrugged. "Well, anytime you're ready."
It took three days before she could make herself go to the nursery. To see the girls.
Shanu was napping, and Bree was thankful for that: the girl was reportedly very hard to talk to. Aashita was sitting on the Sun-lit floor, tinkering with something. Bree saw some flaws, but felt it would be rude to point them out. None of them were critical, and so the girl was better off spotting them on her own.
Behind her, the mobile squeaked. (And made a grinding noise, at the same time.) The youth, lost in her work, didn't notice that, any more than she'd noticed Bree's entrance.
The last mage knelt down next to the eldest of the fae.
"Hi."
The girl looked up.
"Screw you for not coming sooner," she said, then adjusted a spring.
Bree's lips quirked.
"Then you're not that mad," she observed. "I'm told you say a lot worse when you're actually angry. And that you yell at things until they work better. I'd like to see that sometime."
"...it's me," the girl finally said. "I can't make anyone else do it."
"I can't teach mine either," Bree admitted. "But we can show each other. You tinker, and... I was an engineering student once. Working towards being in design and construction. I've been thinking that... this place needs a treehouse. And maybe I need an assistant."
"Maybe you should be the assistant."
"Maybe you should get the squeak out of that mobile."
The pointed nose dipped.
"...I can't."
More quietly, "I'm sorry."
Sun's light streamed in through colorful windows, stained them both in rainbows.
"Not yet," the girl said. "Not until I'm perfect. But maybe that isn't impossible. I don't feel as cold inside as I used to." She looked up at Bree. "You're magic?"
She nodded.
"Are you just going to magic up a treehouse?"
"No. I don't have..." It would take moons to scavenge enough for a rudimentary tablet. "...it doesn't matter. Anyway, real wood's better."
The girl tinkered for a while. Bree subtly nudged a bolt into view.
"They told me we can't go home," Aashita said. "Ever."
"I can't either."
"Our mommy died. Before we found out how to dream."
"Mine's dead too."
"Shanu thinks you should be our mommy." And before Bree could do anything, "I don't. I don't think you're ready to be a mommy. You're too sad to be a mommy."
The last mage took a slow breath.
"I'm sad all the time," Bree said. "Every day. I wake up sad. I go to sleep sad. I have to remember how to wake up again, and then I'm sad anyway. It doesn't fix itself."
"What fixes it?" Pure curiosity.
"I don't know. Maybe treehouses?"
She nudged another bolt. The girl took it.
"Shanu lies a lot," Aashita told Bree. "Or says things in weird ways. She's not being bad. She can't help it most of the time. It's who she is, just like the little tufts in her hair. The ones which made it look like she's got cat ears. So you have to listen to her really carefully, to know what she's saying. And you can't get mad at her."
"I'll try not to."
"But she also says good things. Only you don't know they're good until later. Like about ponies, and how you'd been around them." A pause. "I like the ponies."
"You're eight," Bree observed. "You can't help it."
Which got her glared at. "She knows you're sad. But I think anyone can see that. Anyone can see that, but she said you should..."
She looked at Bree, up and down.
"I don't know if you can," the fae decided. "But she thinks you should. Can I hug you?"
She wound up the gramophone, looked at it for a moment as it rested near the western border of the shield. It was as much privacy as she'd been able to find.
In a way, the record didn't matter. It was music, it was what was available, and New Cynosure didn't exactly have an extensive selection to choose from. But she'd asked for something like 1940s ballroom, as close as pony society could provide.
The disc was placed on the spindle, with the needle moved in. She sat down in the grass, listened, and within thirty seconds, she was crying.
She got up, reached out for the record, ready to sling it into the shield. She had to see it break. She wanted to watch it die.
Then she stopped. Pulled her arm back. Closed her eyes, listened to the music.
And finally, the girl began to dance.
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Every good story should end with a heartrending dance.
This is a really poignant story. Well written indeed. I don't say this often enough, but Estee always does great work, even if I don't always agree 100% with Estee's portrayal of Equestria.
Reading between the lines, and being the first to admit I neither know much about the Old World of Darkness nor take much of an interest... it seems that, in a great irony, Bree failed to rescue any humans at all; the little girls she recovered are a Bastet (a fera - werebeast - with a cat alternate form) and a Nocker (a changeling - a faerie soul incarnated in a human body - with both a knack for machinery and a hot temper that manifests itself in an instinctive foul mouth).
9015897
Actually, a nocker and a pooka.
9015905
Like I said, I don't know the World of Darkness all that well. I preferred the Chronicles of Darkness, for the most part. But Joanne makes me curious; where is she from? She reminds me of the denizens of Columbia from Bioshock: Infinite...
9015917
Baring a sudden outbreak of ideas, the next CDA one-shot story will directly focus on Joanna.
My only real complaint is the touch of hypocrisy that Celestia and less from Luna seem to have of a being that has killed bigger bads to keep their world safe. This could be from unfamiliarity of the source material about the mage type Bree is and how her own descriptions to the diarchy about herself have affected their judgement.
I never really understood why Celestia is portrayed as a uber pacifist that hates any forms of violence. Her as the voice of reason to temper Luna's more aggressive tendency's yes I can see but you cant Abor violence and then create a military/peacekeeping force and never expect them to not fight in need. Nor can you rule for over 1000 years and always find the diplomatic answer. Admittedly she sucks at building a force that can protect the country as seen by the reliance on super weapons and specialized individuals to save the day. Considering she is not as militant as Luna even after centuries of practice it might just be a personal blindspot/flaw in her personality.
Were those shadows a direct manifestation of the Wyrm?
I think the shadows were the Antediluvian of the Lasombra clan. Bloodsucking undead shadows.
Given the old WoD, her odds of anyone she rescued being a human were probably south of 50%.
A wonderfully incomplete ending for characters coming from a broken world. The story doesn’t end, it continues, because struggling for life was what the world of darkness was in many ways.
A poignant ending for Bree. I’m glad she at least has the chance to try to find some peace.
Out of curiosity, the comment about the world being reborn and potentially being worse, was that character ruminating, or a subtle jab at second edition? (I admit I have a bias towards the lore and setting of the original WoD, as it seemed more focused on hope in the night, than wallowing in a dying world, the technocracy was also a great vehicle for setting and story)
Another great story. I read most of your work, and comment on little of it, but I find that’s more an aspect of my own nature than commentary on your works, which I find exceptional, and many times though provoking.
Thank you again for this work, it truely was appreciated.
9016184
Possible, though the scariest thing about Gehenna is that the Antediluvians are at best second-tier threats if all the crap hits the fan.
A requiem for a universe, with several billion endings sandwiched between two beginnings. Devastating work from start to finish, and I mean that in the best way. Thank you for this.
(I'm keeping the more irreverent comments to myself out of respect for the tone, but there is one question I must ask: Do I even want to know how Dr. House ended up in Equestria?)
9016599
Irreverence away. Any dip into the old WoD requires post-traumatic decompression.
Someone finally hit him that hard.
(You can safely presume he deserved it.)
That happy/sad ending! Soo awesome!
More happy, because there are survivors at least!
Jake could probably help bring Equestrian tech levels forward... If no one else is better placed to improve things...
And Bree, being an engineer for New Cynosure! Aww! Yeah!
Those chapter titles... Arete, Avatar, and Mage: The Awakening! Whoo!
--
Midori Days, I assume?
I wonder how they got to Equestria... That part of their stories is usually interesting!
--
9015920
"Directly focus on Johanna" Lol, how that could mean its about her, but not her POV.
9016651
Nope.
i.pinimg.com/originals/9a/78/6e/9a786e4a5baec603d87b8aae0d7e12ba.jpg
9016651
In fact, the chapter names are all terms from Mage: The Ascension itself; Arete is the Mage "power stat", Avatar is the Higher Soul which allows a mage to perform magic, and Awakening is the phenomena whereby a mage unlocks their Avatar in the first place - despite what you'd assume, Ascension is the end-game "transformation".
9016200
As a matter of fact, the irony is that she didn't rescue any humans at all. She rescued changelings, fairy spirits incarnated inside of mortal vessels; that's why they're both flourishing in Equestria, as it lacks the Banality of their homeworld.
9016659
That was my first guess. The fact that there are multiple series where something like that happens to a Japanese youth's right hand says something. I'm not sure what, but something is definitely being said.
On an almost completely different subject, the talk of sending Bree to a superhero world made me imagine her trying to work with John Constantine. Don't know terribly much about the character, so I'm not sure how big of a blast radius I'm proposing.
Wow this series and it’s crossovers have been an amazing read.
9016749
For three seconds, I thought it was going to be Ahnk. I think the most stressful part of this franchise is "hey, I know him!" followed by "No, I don't." And also the moral grey quandaries or something.
If the DC franchise wasn't already represented by Earth-3 here, I'd have thought that Constantine was already in the CDA somewhere. He fits the tone pretty well. Maybe Harry Dresden will be around somewhere. Anyway. here's the comic series following the DC Rebirth. With any luck, he'll be on the new Justice League Dark roster too.
*Alodro belches* Doesn't matter... there's an infinite number of universes... countless copies of all of us... *urp* Half the time we end up dead before we're even born! Nothing matters, nobody's special. Well, except me of course. Excuse me, I need to pay a visit to the Council of Alondros.
(Alondro was Rick before there was Rick!)
9017857
I flipped when I heard her reference Mcgurk.
Wow, I think this is even grimmer than the _actual_ Word of Darkness, which IIRC had an apocalypse but a cyclical, "something survives to carry on" one, but admittedly I only have a superficial level of knowledge of the franchise. Also didn't know the Red Star in WoD was so chatty, thought it more of a Wormwood/sign of end times thing rather than an active player in its own right. Did it blow up the world at the end, or was that someone/something else?
(BTW, minor quibble: I'm not sure the skin of a half Irish/Vietnamese/some admixture of Polynesian could be called "yellow": light brown or olive complexion seems more likely, and even for pale north Asians such as Chinese or Japanese, describing their skin as "yellow" is a bit iffy. Some may take it as a racist insult [1])
[1] Of course Asian Americans sometimes refer to themselves as "yellow", but it's generally the sense of ethnic mobilization, as in "yellow power." And, to confuse the issue further, yellow is of course something of a Chinese national color going back to the Yellow Emperor. Of course, if you're SE Asian yourself and want to self-identify as yellow, more power to you!
Heavy but good, as the CDA stories always are.
Huh, my first thought was Vampire Hunter D but Parasyte is a great choice too.
Is this Bree character a PC Estee created for a game session? It sure feels that way.
Lately, I haven't been replying to comments as much as I should have: combination of 'writing now!' and a schedule which keeps trying to upend itself. Let's see if I can get caught up a little...
9012351
There are WoD wikis, but I'm not going to link to them for one reason: there is no single canon ending. Just about every branch was offered a multiple-choice apocalypse.
9015987
In this case, it's also Celestia having a very real problem with the idea of using an assassin -- which, given the turmoil of this Equestria's founding years, may be something like asking Bruce Wayne to consider the practicality of carrying a gun.
9016105
9016184
Paulon's answer is the right one.
9016200
*snickering*
Splatbook populations add up fast, don't they? Every faction is only a rarity onto themselves, but when you start putting the numbers together...
9016213
Truthfully? A little of both. Bree isn't exactly in a good emotional place when it comes to thinking about any possible Round Two, and there have been times when Second Edition needed some jabbing.
9016692
And apparently, just living with ponies around -- and all the myriad expressions of humanity to be found in New Cynosure -- has lowered Jake's own Banality to the point where Kithain can approach him without pain. That's an amazing accomplishment for a Tech.
As long as I'm typing: Bree cut her hand on a chimerical sword. (Having it look like a long roll of bread was mandatory.) In the last hours, some of the rules began to break down.
9016749
They might actually get along pretty well if he could get past his natural instinct to insult her every three seconds.
(So basically never.)
However, I can safely say that if you dropped Bree into, just for example, the DCU, Arkham's population would become somewhat smaller. In her way, she's still an engineer of sorts, and when you start looking at the presence of certain supervillains as, shall we say, practical problems...
9017857
More towards her library being deliberately understocked and mostly sticking to older titles. (Also, the last in that series was U.S.-published in 1990, so this isn't too much of a stretch forward. My local main library has a dozen or so.)
9018033
The McGurk series, however, is a terminally-underrated classic. (For those who want to look, you're searching for E. W. Hildick.)
9018053
This was a fairly literal interpretation of the red star as the 'Eye of the Wyrm.' (It's also bringing in the idea that with the true force of destruction/renewal corrupted, the entire Euthanatos tradition came about as a means to try and fill the gap.) So yes, Bree survived a hundredth of a second in mental contact with some tiny fragment of that. But don't ask what might have happened if it had gone to 0.02.
9019902
Everyone on the site is entitled to one self-insert.
Just don't ask about my count.
9020515
First, from the other comment: the girls (siblings, BTW) are both Kithain: a nocker and a pooka. Not the first time a pooka's been confused for a shifter.
As said above in the bulk comment, the bread was the cover appearance of a chimerical sword. The world was buckling, and so its true aspect registered to the touch. Painfully.
Allyse was killed by a master Puppeteer wraith using the Obliterate The Soul arcanoi: attunement, numerous 'rides' to get ready, and then permanent removal of the original occupant. This allows the wraith to occupy the body full-time, but also renders that body unusable after a couple of weeks. It's also murder, and the Shadow feasts.
Above all else I am happy that Bree was able to bring herself to dance. I am tempted to make some song references but, no, not this time.
It is so easy to give up, to let the weight crush you. Saying "No" and moving on is so much harder. Bree isn't the sort to go easy, so she dances.
Johanna is the sort of person that needs a reminder that the right to free speech is not the same as immunity to the consequences of the things you say.
I do love that she is so bad even the pony wants her to shut up.
So I was wrong about one of the girls, Changeling was also one of the ones I never got into. At least they won't have to worry about life being too Bland from now on though.
I'm curious as to what the ones with the emerald were trying to do, and what they wound up actually doing in the end.
Was the count on the wind the number of people still alive or something else?
What was that fire in the end?
So many questions, so few answers.
Looking forward to more, as always.
(Kinda wanna bitch slap this version of Celestia and tell her to pull her horn out of her cake fattened rear.)
9020579
Yeah, didn't read the comments before the story. Bread got brought up twice by that point so I had thought it was something more important. But, no, just fae weirdness.
Until now, I always thought Triptych was your greatest work, and although I enjoyed your side-stories, I always wondered when the next Triptych piece would appear. The months were divided between waiting for the next chapter, then dismally waiting for the end of the month so the next wait could begin. I'd always avoided the CDA stories because I just didn't think I'd be interested in that kind of thing, until I didn't.
This was brilliant, and terrible, in all the right ways. I went to bed troubled by the things you have painted with your words, the story that was told here, and this, this...now I see what powerful things you can write, it felt, it almost felt like, the ponies were holding you back. This is a story that could be shared with anybody, not knowing what ponies are, and derive great enjoyment.
Reading this was a beautiful agony, a bar set so high, I scarce believe it could be crossed again. Your world is challenging, confrontational, and all the more poignant because it is not so far from our own. We can easily see the imagined wrongs you describe and wish that we had the power to undo them, yet I wondered if I had not walked past a dozen of your characters and never known. Never done anything.
I felt disempowered, frustrated, and useless. I don't think I've ever felt this way about a story, fan-fiction or otherwise, in my life.
Thank you. I truly enjoyed reading your work.
Kudos to doing a damn good interpretation of the world of darkness end times. I just got finished reading all your CDA fics because I had skipped them for some reason, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well you managed to breath a lot of emotion and feeling into an otherwise goofy multiverse idea.
I'm always looking forward to your stories, keep up the good work.
Damn. A fitting end, but damn. This one was an emotional roller coaster and a prime example of why you shouldn't read too much of Estee in a dark mood in a single sitting
Still loved it though, but didn't want to see WoD die... at least not like that.