Daring Do and the Hand of Doom

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 66: The Gift of a Sword

Preparations were underway, somewhere at least. Flock and Daring Do were no doubt hard at work, probably pulling in Rainbow Dash as well. Even Caballeron might have been participating. Caballeron, who Sweetie Drops had originally set out to apprehend. Caballeron who had badly injured an agent that Sweetie Drops had trained personally. Sweetie Drops could not help but wonder how well the young mare was recovering. Perhaps the physical therapy was helping, or perhaps she was still lying in bed, wondering what had gone wrong.

If there had been time, Sweetie Drops might have been lying in a bed beside her. Her body had been badly broken, but it was healing. Or so she thought. It was impossible to know. The body she possessed in Flocks half-real world was a different one, one that would never heal. If her real body would heal while she remained behind, hiding, she was not sure.

And that was what she was doing, at least in her own mind. She had dragged herself away from the others and retired into a distant, quiet room in Flock’s warehouse-castle. Of course, although it was quiet and isolated the room was by no means pleasant.

This particular one took the form of a large hexagon, the walls of which contained recessed niches. The niches themselves were filled with cases with icy glass fronts, and inside were unspeakable monstrosities. Sweetie Drops knew most of their names, and could infer the nearest relatives of the rest. They were horrors that were supposed to have been purged from Equestria long ago, monsters that were now either extinct or had only a few specimens left, all locked away in Tartarus. Many by her own hoof.

They stared at her, almost as if they could see. They could not, of course, but Sweetie Drops was sure that they were still alive. Alive, but frozen. She was familiar with the feeling.

In fact, this place was the only one where she felt comfortable in the whole place. She was well aware of the irony, that she could only feel at peace surrounded by the creatures that had historically been her enemies. Yet they were familiar to her. She understood them. They were things that she knew how to fight. The rules were laid out at the start of any fight, laid out in agency monster-fighting manuals and vedmak grimoires.

At least, there was a time when Sweetie Drops could fight them. That time had probably passed her by. She was not sure if she was glad of that.

A hoof tapped at the doorless opening to the chamber. Sweetie Drops did not need to turn around to see who it was.

“White,” she said.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

Sweetie Drops looked over her shoulder. White blinked. Her eyes were large and oddly innocent, even if they were an unsettling red color.

“You’re back. Did you get what you needed?”

“Mother successfully acquired the artifact, yes. What she intends to do with it, I don’t know. It makes me afraid. I saw it. My eye…it’s not the same. I don’t see the same. But I still shivered, as if I had real eyes. It is a very evil thing.”

“It should be. Supposedly it used to belong to an incredibly vicious dark wizard. One of the worst.”

“Mother says she wants to…wear it.”

Sweetie Drops took a deep breath. She did not agree with most of what Daring Do did, considering it too reckless- -but the idea of wearing the Masque of Red Death was outright insane, even by her standards. Nothing good could come of it.

“I’m sure she has a plan,” lied Sweetie Drops. “It’s going to be okay.”

White stared at her. “I wanted to say the same thing to you.”

“Me?” Sweetie Drops was taken aback, and instinctively became defensive. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing. But you were hurt. And it made me feel bad. I…if I could have talked, I could have warned you. That the Grandmaster is not a normal pony. That you didn’t have a chance.” She lowered her eyes. “And if…if I was not afraid, I could have told mother that the pony she trusted was him. But I was too scared.” She looked up cautiously. “Does that make me a coward?”

Sweetie Drops leaned back, trying not to look down at herself. “A little,” she admitted. “But I don’t think it’s binary.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Everypony’s a coward sometimes. And everypony’s brave sometimes. You can’t be one or the other. If you’re all coward, you end up like Flock, hiding out away from anypony at all and only coming out when somepony’s weak and failing. If you’re too brave, you end up like Rainbow Dash and end up getting stuck with a literal buttload of poison darts.”

“But which one am I?”

“How should I know? I haven’t known you long enough.” White looked somewhat disappointed, but Sweetie Drops continued. “But I have to say, so far? You have promise. A little bit at least.”

“Really?”

Sweetie Drops nodded. “The problem is, your training outpaced your age. That’s bad. Really bad. That’s how ponies end up getting hurt or worse. But the advantage? It’s a lot easier for age to catch up to you than it is for training.”

“Like in mother.”

Sweetie Drops was once again taken aback. That was an odd thing to say, but she supposed it was true. Sweetie Drops supposed that she had never considered it consciously, but despite her appearance Daring Do must have been much older than she looked, at least based on what was written in her books.

“You can come in, you know,” said Sweetie Drops. “Unless you’re afraid of the monsters.”

White looked up at them, as if she had not seen them before. “Are you afraid of them?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I am either. They look pretty. I wish I could see them active.”

“Trust me. You don’t. They’re not nice.”

“Neither are you. But I like you.”

Sweetie Drops laughed. White smiled, but only slightly, hesitating strangely. Then she entered the room, and Sweetie Drops saw that she was carrying a long, black scabbard at her side, one constructed of an unidentifiable but extraordinarily aged material.

“What is that?”

For a moment, Sweetie Drops thought that White would draw the sword and finish what her Grandmaster had started. Her body reacted instinctively, positioning itself in a way that she could snap upward. Even as incomplete as she was, she could still get her hooves around White’s throat. She would just need to squeeze for a few seconds. That would be more than enough, even for a Pegasus.

Instead, White held out the sword without drawing it. Sweetie Drops instantly felt ashamed, and wondered what she had become.

“What is this?”

“I’m sorry,” said White. She was unable to meet Sweetie Drops’s gaze, and Sweetie Drops thought she might be crying. “You said the only reason you could not put down your sword because it was given to you by a friend. The Grandmaster broke it, and you are finally free. You don’t have to fight anymore. You can go home, live with your Lyra-friend. Be a normal pony. But you won’t, will you?”

“Did somepony tell you to do this?”

White shook her head. “You would fight anyway. And you don’t have a sword. I don’t want you to get hurt. But I’m giving you a sword. And I’m…your friend. I’m taking what the Grandmaster gave to you. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Please don’t hate me.”

Sweetie Drops stared at her, and then sighed. She could have refused the sword, let White keep it, either to throw it away or to keep it as her own. Yet she could not refuse. A gift given like this was not the sort that one could simply turn away.

She took the scabbard. It was made of a strange, hard substance, a substance that Sweetie Drops instantly recognized as dragon skin. The sword inside was oddly heavy, and had a hilt of wound black wire below a silver hoof-ring. What drew Sweetie Drops’s attention, though, was the pommel. It was shaped like the head of a bird- -or a griffon.

With one swift motion she drew the sword. It sung as it was removed from the home that had no doubt held it for countless centuries, yet the blade was neither rusted nor tarnished. It flashed in the light, and Sweetie Drops recognized the unmistakable glint of silver.

Yet the blade was strange. The main body of it was not actually metal, but rather a kind of perfect black colored stone. Sweetie Drops realized that it was made of some kind of obsidian, although not a single piece. Perhaps it had been once, but it has since been shattered. At some point somepony had taken the pieces and carefully reassembled them, lining them with a came of hypercrystaline silver as though they were forging a stained-glass window. The workmanship was unparalleled, and the silver that reinforced the stone blade was inscribed with symbols and runes. None of them were simple or linear, and they resembled the spells of wizards- -but Sweetie Drops recognized them, and they confirmed what the pommel of the sword should have already told her.

“The School of the Griffon,” she said. “My school. This is a vedmak sword.” She looked up at White, her eyes wide. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it. In his collection. I took it, but did not ask. Is that wrong?”

“No. This does not belong to him anyway. And I won’t let him keep it. That would just be too insulting.”

“To whom?”

“To…to some good friends. Friends that wouldn’t want this sword to rot here.”

White continued to stare at her. She had ceased all motion. “Then…I did good? You’re not angry?”

“I’m always angry.” Sweetie Drops slid the sword back into is scabbard. As she did, she could not help but notice the faded symbol emblazoned on it. A symbol of a black crystal. Sweetie Drops shivered, knowing where this sword had been. She vowed to give it a proper scabbard, not one cursed by the insignia of Sombra.

“You did good, White. Thank you.”

White smiled. She enjoyed having friends.