Tales from Everfree City

by LoyalLiar

14-4

XIV - IV

The Last Duel of Star Swirl the Bearded and Wintershimmer the Complacent

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

If, while reading this, you happen to find yourself in Celestia's quarters and you see Philomena, stab that bird in the neck for me.

Despite my earlier intimations, Silhouette and I did not actually consummate our new friendship that particular night. Instead, disgruntled as she was, she retired to wherever it was she actually lived in town with the loss of her military position, leaving me alone in Wintershimmer's room until the following morning. Then she returned, still angry but refusing to talk further on the subject, wanting to find some less emotionally-involved physical activity to relieve her irritation with Typhoon, and I suggested she help me sort through and empty Wintershimmer's vaults. The idea was to get the controversial stuff before Star Swirl arrived to abscond with irreplaceable knowledge, raise ethical dilemmas, and generally create problems.

So it was that, carrying the birdcage of the phoenix Wintershimmer had kept on-hoof to prolong his lifespan toward a century in her quicksilver claw, Silhouette had ducked under the door of the vault, unerringly swung the cage in the vague direction of my head beside her to make sure it fit through the lower doorframe, brought the bars rather close to my head, and allowed a vibrant orange beak to slip just far enough out of the bars to chomp down on a particularly well-formed pale ear.

My reaction to yet further pain in an already painful and embarrassing day was very nearly to kill the damn bird with the Razor. The only thing that stopped me was a little voice in the back of my head.

"You know how much effort it took me to capture a live phoenix; I will be quite cross if you ruin it. And, being a sentient creature, I am certain your new mentor will care if you wantonly murder it."

I refrained from answering Wintershimmer's ghost only because of Silhouette's presence, and instead devoted my attention to directing my candlecorn as it carried two crates of priceless necromantic texts and scrolls, whose planks it had sunken into the wax of its sides instead of carrying them by magic or by balancing them atop its back.

"It's weird to be around those things now that you're in charge of them," said Silhouette. "Don't you find them unsettling?"

"They're just golems," I answered with a shrug. "They can't do anything on their own."

"That's what you said at Platinum's Landing. And now I'm missing a foreleg. Not that the new one isn't great, but I'm not exactly excited to lose another one to the same mistake."

I shook my head. "Wintershimmer was possessing them from inside the Summer Lands. And he's gone now." (I heard Wintershimmer's voice scoff in my mind.) "I can control them the same way, but nopony else knows how; not even Star Swirl, I think. So either it's me, or it's the golem acting on my orders. Either way, you're entirely safe."

"If you say so. I just…" Silhouette trailed off as the door opposite us in the old workshop swung open, revealing two wizards to whom I had quite opposite emotional reactions.

"Ah, hard at work already I see, Morty," said Archmage Star Swirl the Bearded, now clad in his unpleasantly noisy robes and carrying a gnarled staff in the crook of his right foreleg. "And miss, I recognize you from the aftermath of Wintershimmer's debacle, but I confess your name is escaping me."

"Silhouette," my companion introduced herself, setting down the cage of the phoenix you likely know as Celestia's pet, Philomena. "Nice to meet you, Mr…"

I let out a small sigh. "Silhouette, these are Archmagi Star Swirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever; Court Mage of Equestria and Archmage of River Rock, respectively. Archmagi, this is Silhouette, an old nemesis and now friend of mine."

"Morty makes for the most interesting introductions," Clover observed, amused, and offered a hoof to shake with Silhouette, before glancing down with raised brow at the liquid limb which answered the motion. "Ah, Master, this is the golem prosthetic you were mentioning? Fascinating."

"It is," Star Swirl agreed, before glancing at Silhouette. "Odd Wintershimmer was kind enough to give you full control over it when he wasn't around to override it, but I'm glad he did. I don't know if I could have overridden his control if he gave it a will of its own. Your foreleg might be the most sophisticated golem in equine history. I'd tell you to take good care of it, because I'm not sure either Morty or I could repair it, but given it's liquid metal, I can hardly imagine how you would go about damaging it in the first place."

"Huh." Silhouette nodded, glancing down at the limb in question, and idly forming fingers with which to flex in and out of a fist. "I guess I should be thankful?"

"It seems like you're already unloading most of Wintershimmer's stuff," said Clover, looking around the room. "Master Star Swirl said you needed our help, Morty, but we can certainly get out of your mane if you've got the situation handled."

I let out a small sigh—perhaps with just a hint of a huff of annoyance. "This is all stuff from the main vault, where Celestia and Gale and I fought one of the candlecorns. But there is also his private store, which I don't know how to get into." I indicated a familiar old bookshelf, not especially distinct from the other bookshelves in the room. "All I know is that it's trapped, probably lethally, specifically to keep you out." (The 'you', as I had mentioned previously, was directed to Star Swirl.)

"I'm assuming the vault is behind the bookshelf?" Clover asked.

"Well, it could be anywhere," I answered, wandering over to the shelf and pulling a heavy green book from the wall. For the first time after all my years watching Wintershimmer pull that same tome off the shelf, I could finally read the title. "The Encyclopedia of Touch-Contagious Diseases: A Survivor's Record."

Star Swirl snorted a laugh, and when we all turned to look at him, he muttered "Wintershimmer used to be a very funny stallion, when we were foals. That reminds me of his sense of humor. But it looks like you were mistaken, Morty, or there's more to it. That didn't open the door."

I flipped open to the middle of the book, and then dramatically dropped it on the floor of the workshop. With a vast riffling and folding, building to an almost skittering, living churn, the pages began to peel away from one another, unfolding and spreading until all four of us were forced to step away toward the walls of the room lest our hooves be swallowed in a parchment sea. Very little space remained around the perfect oval I had unleashed. And then, with the ominous grinding not of paper but stone, the center of the oval began to sink. Step by step, notch by notch, it lowered, clearly moving through space that should have been solid floor. After the first hoof of depth, one flat segment about a hoof across halted its descent. A moment later, another hoof down, there was another. Stair after stair emerged from the infinite parchment until, at last, the staircase ended—and the pages of the book that lined the 'shaft" of the stairwell blocking the path forward peeled away like a curtain to reveal an ominous doorway of ebony wood, framed in a wall of pale white stone that most certainly did not match any rock native to the glittering Crystal Spire.

"That's as far as I've ever seen," I explained, sauntering over to the side of the room and fetching my inherited staff. "So that we all have our expectations set, I appreciate your assistance, but what's in there is mine. I don't care if it's a clump of his earwax or a diamondfyre. Are we understood?"

"What's a diamond fire?" Silhouette asked.

Clover frowned. "Not the best part of our history. A diamondfyre is an enchanted gemstone turned into a weapon. Stories say they could wipe a city off the map, though more likely the damage inflicted would be limited to a neighborhood or a single large castle or fortification. Regardless, they're enormously powerful, and terrifyingly dangerous."

"And we won't find any here," Star Swirl added bluntly.

Clover raised a brow. "You sound confident in that, Master."

"I have all five known remaining diamondfyre in my analogue to this vault," Star Swirl admitted. "Archmage Comet spent the later years of her life getting them all together for her research; she entrusted them to me when she passed, and I hid them from Wintershimmer, as well as ponies like Hurricane."

Clover looked worriedly to her mentor at the comment. "I thought Hurricane was your friend. He may have been a soldier, but he always struck me as a great pony."

"Oh certainly," Star Swirl agreed. "But I knew there'd come a day when he decided he needed to cross that moral boundary for what he'd say was a just cause. Maybe the dragons, maybe wiping out Halite at Onyx Ridge and taking Jade with her. Maybe against the Windigoes, at the cost of your life. Whatever the case, there is magic in this world that should not be set free, even under the most desperate of circumstances. And there are many, many ponies who will indulge the easy path that such magic tempts."

I took in a short breath, and then without turning announced "Silhouette, you should leave."

"What? Why?"

"Last time I let you get involved in a wizard's duel, you lost a leg. And if I learned anything from killing Wintershimmer, it's that making sure my friends don't get hurt makes the fighting a lot harder. If you want to keep helping me out, go ask your friends about what we talked about earlier."

"Sure thing, boss," Silhouette replied with dripping sarcasm, but she did depart the room.

"So…" Clover glanced between Star Swirl and I a few times over her glasses, before finally she said "I can see there's some tension here. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Star Swirl looked to me, apparently yielding. I shrugged. "You tell her; I'm not repeating myself again."

"Either we both say our side, or we agree to table our disagreement," Star Swirl answered quite firmly. "I trust Clover's counsel, even if she disagrees with me."

After a moment's consideration I took a deep breath and threw myself into the philosophical deep. "I have the Scourge of Kings. It originates from extreme mana burn, in my case from fighting Wintershimmer. Presumably, Electrum wasn't actually cursed by Celestia, and instead overworked his horn in a similar way. In both cases, Wintershimmer had a cure: a horn transplant. I need Wintershimmer's research. Your beloved mentor thinks using it is a bad idea and won't hoof it over."

"Really? Why?"

Clover had turned to her old master, but I picked up the answer on a surge of verbal momentum. "Because I might get myself killed—nevermind that it's a risk I'm willing to take. And because it dishonors the ponies Wintershimmer mutilated to figure out and prove the process in the first place."

Clover frowned at me gently. "I would like to hear that part of the argument from Master Star Swirl, Morty."

I still had a great deal of respect for Clover from our limited prior interactions, and most notably from our duel in the dragon lands. Thus, I felt more than a bit ashamed of myself, as I hung my head and muttered "Apologies."

"Master?" Clover prompted.

"To some extent, Morty's representation of my points are accurate, though he misses nuance, and one particularly major case that, I admit, I haven't drawn attention to previously. Our other discussions had been in open company." I perked a brow as I shot Star Swirl a side-eyed glance. "To address his first point: I do think there's more to being a wizard than violence by way of a horn. There is no doubt in my mind Morty will one day be a world authority on necromancy, and he is already the sole surviving keeper of several legacies of magic that were already lost to unicorn tradition until Wintershimmer resurrected them. To even risk throwing that all away in the belief that his value comes solely from violence is to do a great disservice to generations of young mages who will follow when all of us are gone." (Ha!)

"To his second point: it's a valid point, but a minor one. If there were no risk or uncertainty, and with my third point notwithstanding, I would agree the need for healing outweighs the ethical unpleasantness by which we learned of this treatment.

"But my third point is this: once the greater public knows this is possible—not just as a freakish novelty that Wintershimmer dragged out of the dungeons to win an argument, but displayed proudly on the brow of of a stallion of high reputation, used to achieve all sorts of feats of magic and heroics—where does it end?"

Clover quirked a brow. "I don't follow; surely there are less than a hundred carriers of the Scourge of Kings? And given the only two ponies to actually stumble onto a new case in all of history were Morty and Electrum the Omniscient, the slippery slope seems like it isn't very steep and doesn't slide very far."

"Only if your imagination restricts you to seeing this as a limited cure for the Scourge of Kings. But never forget: Wintershimmer's first demonstration was giving magic to an earth pony."

Clover's eyes widened.

I was, perhaps, not so enlightened. "So you're worried, what, somepony irresponsible is going to learn to do a ritual it took Wintershimmer to figure out, and start grave robbing to stitch herself into an alicorn?"

Star Swirl shook his head. "I'm worried that well-meaning ponies like Meadowbrook will see this knowledge as an advancement of medicine, and take something currently only accessible to highly educated mages, and make it available to the masses. Then I will expect it to be misused. And I don't just fear grave-robbing. How much do you think the richest nobles or the less-scrupulous merchants of Lubuck would pay for a horn, or wings? Enough for the toughs in dark alleys and highwaymares at the edges of society not to ask questions?" Star Swirl sighed, and concluded "Once this djinni is out of its bottle, every step toward that horrible future will be a step for moral good, up until the very last one. You've heard the expression that the road to Tartarus is paved with good intentions?"

"I…" Clover looked between us, and started with me. "He's right that just killing monsters is a reductive view of the good we can do as wizards. I can understand if you find Diadem's radical position in the opposite direction restrictive, but I believe there exists wisdom in a middle ground." Then she turned to Star Swirl. "Similarly, Master, I see your concern, but surely there's a compromise we could make for Morty's sake, rather than costing him the use of his horn for the rest of his life. I for one would advocate we all band together, work through the research, eliminate the risk, and cure Morty's case before it has the chance to spread. If we could eliminate the Scourge of Kings, and then destroy the research, wouldn't that be worth it? To spare ponies like Platinum their suffering?"

Star Swirl sighed, and in that sigh, it occurred to me that neither he nor I could reveal what we both knew about how far progressed the elder Platinum's case was to the mare who, of the three of us, was surely her closest friend. "Then, Morty, it seems you have your answer. I'm already a century old, and when I am gone, the care of that research I sealed away will pass into Clover's hooves. Perhaps, in the time I'm still here, going without using your horn will at least give you some perspective into our point of view."

"You realize you're actively incentivizing me to not mention a trap on the way into this vault and kill you?"

The most famous archmage in Equestrian history chuckled. "If Wintershimmer managed to build a trap that could kill me past Clover's luck without him even being here, then I deserve to die. But I'm also going to call your bluff, Morty: you're a better pony than that, no matter how angry my position makes you."

With that, Star Swirl walked down the parchment stairs to the door of the vault, and began to inspect it.

"Sorry," Clover whispered, before gesturing with a hoof that I was welcome to go before her. "I should mention, Morty: while I can maintain my spell while doing other things, like I did in our duel, it's enormously taxing. So unless you specifically need me, my plan is to stand behind the two of you and maintain the spell, so that if you do set off any traps or defenses, we can all have good 'luck' and things will be okay."

I walked up to the door—the farthest I had ever seen Wintershimmer progress into the vault. As I did, I raised the skeletal staff of my predecessor in an emulation of his style, and found myself satisfied that the motion was enough to open the doorway. What we found behind it was a long stone hall, its bland flagstone walls only decorated with little iron braziers—or more accurately, the skeletons of braziers—which flickered to life one by one despite the complete lack of fuel or spark to fuel their flames.

"Ominous," Clover muttered behind me.

Star Swirl scoffed. "Yet more of Wintershimmer's flair for the dramatic. He could just as easily have laid his traps in a better decorated—and shorter—hallway. But that wouldn't serve his aesthetic, would it, Morty?"

"No, I imagine it wouldn't." I stepped past Star Swirl into the hallway, dipped the skull on the staff in the direction of a fire, and watched it open its mouth to catch a bit of the magical flame between its teeth, in an emulation of a fleshier, livelier dragon. "On the other hoof, on the topic of aesthetic, Wintershimmer knew better than to think he could make bells on a robe long enough to trip on 'work'."

"There's no need to take our disagreement to such petty grounds, Coil," Star Swirl snapped. "Lestwise I might point out that at least my school of thought sees its members fed enough not to look sickly."

I stopped mid-stride, turned around to face the bearded old stallion, and for just a second I found myself on the verge of listing off mares of roughly my age who preferred my physique to his. Fortunately, a voice in the edge of my mind spoke up first.

"You will not enjoy comparing sexual exploits with Star Swirl," cautioned Wintershimmer's grim tone. "Or so I infer, given how hesitant you were to challenge me on similar grounds some time ago, when I still drew breath. Remember, the stallion is over a century in age. And Clover is his granddaughter, lest you forget; you know the stallion has had success in his personal affairs. Do not pick a losing fight."

"Should we continue?" Clover asked, gesturing on ahead. And, neither Star Swirl nor I seeing reason to stand in the hall and bicker, we all pressed on.

The first deathtrap Wintershimmer set came very abruptly, when partway down the hall, Star Swirl's hoof caused the stone beneath it to ripple like a shallow puddle.

"Hmm… see that?" he asked, nudging the point again with the barest tip of his hoof.

I nodded. "An illusion?"

"Alongside necromancy, it was always one of Wintershimmer's specialties." Star Swirl lit his horn, and then gasped when Clover lunged forward, grabbed his shoulder with a hoof, and pulled him back.

"No!"

"What?" Star Swirl frowned. "Your spell warn you of something?"

Clover nodded. "Dispelling that would be a very bad idea."

"Huh." I briefly raised my hoof as if to push further beyond the invisible line Star Swirl had found, but then thought the better of it. "Any idea what happens if we were to dispel it?"

"That's the downside of the spell, alas." Clover shook her head. "I get a relatively ideal possible future, but it's not like I get to see what the other possibilities were."

"Fair enough." I glanced around the hallway, then lifted the dragon staff up to a brazier and placed the iron between its teeth. When the skeletal dragon bit down, I pulled, and some tension and coiling in the spine of the staff added to my strength, wrenching the ironworks from the wall. With a flick down the hallway, I indicated my desire, and the staff followed suit, 'spitting out' the torn down brazier. As we all watched, it flew down the hall about two strides length before abruptly being struck by a beam of green light shooting up through the floor, which made it rather grayer and less shiny.

Lest I delay your gratification longer than I had to wait myself, when the now duller iron hit the ground, it exploded into fragmented little shards that, with a squint to focus my eyesight on them, I realized were stone.

"Petrification," Star Swirl observed. "Not usually Wintershimmer's go-to."

"So we know there's a trap in the floor that the illusion is hiding," I summarized. "Which can be triggered by something flying overhead, even if it doesn't touch the floor itself. Which suggests some sort of basic anima of intelligence?"

"You think there's a candlecorn in the floor?" Star Swirl asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe just the candle part? Hard to say without dispelling the illusion that's hiding it. I still don't understand why that's a bad idea yet… Should we try standing back further in the hallway and see if dispelling the illusion would be safer?"

"Backing up strikes me as a good idea," said Star Swirl. "But I have a better solution for getting a clearer picture." As we all strode back, Star Swirl's horn ignited in golden magic and, well back of the illusion, he drove a spell into the floor. There before us, stone smoothed and flattened, and then… a wooden frame began to appear around the edges of the hallway, delineating a roughly four-leg by three-leg cutaway of the walkway. The contents of frame slowly turned to glass, and as we watched, the transformation of stone into glass extended downward at a shallow angle, toward the space below the illusion, from whence the petrifying ray had been flung.

It was a tour de force of magic; in all my years I'm certain Star Swirl is the only pony I can think of who could transmute so much matter in such a magically rich environment so casually. Indeed, though, the effect was brilliant, and the revelation was startling. Eventually, Star Swirl's window pierced through to a chamber disguised from above with the illusion we'd tentatively tapped. The view wasn't altogether useful, but it was revealing.

"Miasma's toxin," I observed of the acrid purple haze, roiling and churning as if the clouds had been distilled within disturbed water. "So the magic isn't just an illusion; it's holding the gas back."

Clover nodded. "But then we still don't know anything about the petrification spell…"

I shook my head. "Maybe we don't need to. I'd bet a good bit the point of it is: if we hadn't seen it when I threw the brazier to try and judge how far the illusion stretched down the hall, then when we saw this, we'd teleport or levitate ourselves or walk on the ceiling or something to get past the pit of gas. It's a trap specifically designed to punish wizards who notice the first trap and take an obvious solution to bypass it."

"Oh," said Clover, nervousness creeping into her voice. "I… suppose I'm not ruthless enough to have thought of using a trap as a diversion for another trap."

"With no offense meant," said Star Swirl, "that is why I wasn't going to do this without Morty present. Out of all of us, he has the best chance of understanding Wintershimmer's mindset. What do you propose, Morty?"

"Can you shapeshift a bridge for us out of the stone floor?" I asked. "Since the petrification was a beam coming from below, as long as we've got something between us, that should work for a shield as well as getting us over the gas pit."

"Trivially," said Star Swirl, and barely sooner had I said it than it was done. Sure enough, as the bridge extended forward, a green beam shot up—only to be transformed from a slightly darker stone into a more lightly colored one. Star Swirl extended the bridge a good stride or two past the point of the beam before lowering it back down to floor level, at which point he looked at me. "Think that's far enough?"

I shrugged. "I'm gonna walk forward now; if the petrification trap is still there, I know Clover can undo that for me. But try and stay close enough for me to still have your luck; I don't want to risk not having that if there's something else on the far end."

As I walked forward with very slow steps, I idly queried back "Clover, did Archmage Hourglass come to you while you were working on this 'luck' spell?"

I didn't dare to look back, but I heard enough of Clover's posture shift to guess at a shrug. "No, why? Did she come to visit you?"

"Yes," said Star Swirl with a sigh. "After he awoke from fighting Wintershimmer."

"More recently too," I added. "I, um, stumbled on a secret room in my new house. Apparently…" I stuck my forehoof out just barely past the edge of the bridge but then immediately pulled it back. The nervousness was not rewarded; absolutely nothing happened. So, slowly, I began to lower the same hoof down to the floor at the bridge's end. "Solemn Vow had made a hidden room with Clockwork's Runic Septagraph carved in the floor. He'd used it to set up Hourglass' Horological Hoop… though obviously he hadn't maintained it since his death. Hourglass came to me while I was trying to fix it."

"A Horological Hoop? But you don't have Tourmaline's Grimoire, do you?" Clover asked.

Star Swirl chuckled. "Just because it's tradition to put your thesis in the old book doesn't mean that's the only place anypony writes theirs down, Clover. Especially not Hourglass, given she seems keen to spill her secrets everywhere she possibly can."

My hoof met solid ground; nothing terrible, or even notable, happened. After two solid steps forward, I gestured for my elders to join me. "I was curious if she had to warn you about the effects of your spell on the health of time and reality themselves."

"Oh, no," said Clover. "I spent fifteen years perfecting this slowly. It's very stable."

"She puts my Omniomorphic spell to shame, Morty," said Star Swirl. "When you see my old chicken scratch in Tourmaline's Grimoire someday, you'll understand Clover's the real mage to be admired."

"Oh please, Master," said Clover. "You redefined an entire school of magic. I just wrote a clever trick with divination."

"Isn't it sickening how they play off one another with these platitudes?" asked Wintershimmer's voice in my mind. "No wonder their philosophy led to the intellectual dead-end of Diadem's school. Beware lest you should become this way with the changeling and the earth pony."

I didn't feel the need to acknowledge Wintershimmer's comment, but it did bring to mind an idle curiosity. "Star Swirl, did Wintershimmer ever ask you about shapeshifting monsters up here in the Union? Or, I guess it would've still been in Halite or Corundum's days, before the 'Union' proper."

Star Swirl cocked his head. "You mean like the ones from your little duel at the schoolhouse?" When I confessed to my surprise with a raised brow, the bearded archmage chuckled. "Celestia doesn't keep many secrets from me, and I did already suspect there was more to your little bear-cub companion than just a case of lycanthropy. No, to answer your question. I only spoke to Wintershimmer rarely in his exile, at least until Jade unified the crystals into a society we could peacefully interact with. I reached out to him once about the centaur and a gargoyle named Scorpan, but—"

"He knows," Clover observed. "He saw my memories when we fought."

"Ah, yes." Star Swirl sighed. "You defiled her soul."

Clover chuckled. "Better than doing what Wintershimmer had wanted, Master. Come on; let's see what the next horror is." Clover took two steps forward, then shuddered in place as the ground beneath all of us could be felt to shift.

"A trap?" I asked.

Clover shook her head. "My spell would've caught it. I don't feel anything. Which suggests a divination blocker of some kind, rather than danger in-and-of itself. We're just going to have to be a bit more careful going forward from here, and—ah!"

That last noise was echoed somewhat by both Star Swirl and I as, past the petrification beam and the toxin pit, just past the edge of the bridge, the hallway in front of us tipped down into a slide, sending us all rolling together into the dark. I should stress, lest you think we were idiots, that continued forward without Clover's spell, that we hadn't actually moved forward at all. It would have been especially smart to back up, but wizards of any quality are not, on a whole, the kind of ponies to take a step back when volunteers are called for, even when that is objectively the smartest thing to do.

Star Swirl almost immediately slipped and fell, while Clover and I scrambled backwards—only to find that the hallway some distance back behind was part of a rather large see-saw like contraption, and our path back had been blocked by the rising back half. Star Swirl's horn ignited to try and teleport away (or something; I don't know what he meant precisely), only to fizzle and spark like an apprentice foal's first stab at a third-circle incantation.

The slide lasted for a surprising while, even if the darkness lasted only a moment; by the time the upper hallway was out of sight, we began to see a light from below. Then, as we slid further, there were more lights: braziers, around an apparently elliptical room of harsh gray stone with a dull brown dirt floor. The ceiling was its most interesting quality, absolutely covered in bitter black void crystal, so much that the air felt thin and empty to the trained horns of the three mages who were deposited on the floor in something of a heap.

"Damn," said Star Swirl, trying to rise to his hooves and visibly struggling until Clover and I were able to help him up. "Broken," he muttered, lifting his right foreleg and noting the sickening angle his ankle dangled. "And thanks to my old friend's choice in ceiling decor, I can't even shapeshift to fix it. At least we know why your spell died on us, Clover."

"You can heal broken bones with with the Omnimorphic spell?" I asked. "What else can you heal?"

"It only lasts as long as you keep up the spell," Clover explained. "Remember, for all its advantages, you can't seal the Omnimorphic permanently." Then she shook her head and looked around. "How is this even in a demiplane, with all this void crystal? This has to be… most of the void crystal in the known world, right?"

"It's not a demiplane," Star Swirl noted.

I nodded, taking note of a few glimmering veins and split geodes of precious crystals interwoven between the stones and void crystals in the walls and ceiling. "We're underground in the Union. Nowhere else has this many natural gem veins. Not even close."

"I imagine we're directly beneath the Crystal Spire," Star Swirl added. "The older I get, the less I believe in coincidence. Morty, our discussion of Grogar's tunnels beneath the spire when we were in the carriage on the way here seems much less theoretical."

"Grogar?" Clover asked.

"Ancient goat lich," I answered. "Built the Spire a long time ago."

"Fun," joked Clover. "And do you see anything to this trap? Are we just supposed to lose hope here and starve?"

Star Swirl scoffed. "Maybe that's Wintershimmer's idea of irony. A trap that reduces me to just a tired old stallion."

I, however, had to shake my head. "You think the guy who wrote the Razor is just gonna let us sit here and figure out a way to get out? All we know is it won't be magic killing us. I'd bet on some kind of poison gas."

My bet was proven wrong, but the principle sound, frighteningly quickly. The stones of the wall on the far side of the chamber began to grind and twist and crack, and then pull apart under their own volition (probably enchanted from within so as to stay insulated from the void crystals on the ceiling).

Issuing from behind the stones, the three of us heard a serpentine hiss and a distinctive rattle, a dozen times deeper than any rattlesnake one might trample underhoof.

"Is that—?" Clover started to ask.

"Basilisk," I hissed, hurling myself at my companions and stretching out a leg to block their eyes as they had both (naturally) looked toward the noise before the sound issued forth. I managed to put my foreleg in front of Star Swirl's eyes, though I wound up punching Clover in the face (thankfully with far less strength than my romantic interest had to me the night before), and though I felt a bit bad for a fraction of a moment, I also managed to turn her head away in time not to meet the creature's horrifying gaze.

"Ow!" Clover said, and then a moment later "Thank you, Morty. But… aren't its eyes going to be warded by the void crystal? They're magic too, right?"

I shook my head. "Remember Hurricane's armor still lets Typhoon throw ice. The crystals only work on arcana." (Of historical note: void crystal isn't wholly ineffective against pegasus magic; however, most of the time a pegasus uses magic it's insulated from the air by being wrapped in an elemental 'packet', like a wall of fire or a barrage of icicles.)

"I'm not sure that it makes much of a difference," muttered Star Swirl, as we all listened to the rattling slowly slither forward and worked very hard not to look toward our impending deaths. "We can't fight it without magic, and even if we never look in its eyes, its fangs are still lethally poisonous."

"So we need to get our magic back." It was very, very hard not sweep my eyes around the room to help supply an idea, so I instead squinted them shut and outright sat down. "I don't know a ton about void crystal, so if either of you have a trick up your sleeves, I welcome it."

Clover proposed the first idea, as half-baked as it (understandably, given the timeframe) was. "Morty, you and I will run. Throw dirt or rocks at it when it's going after me, I'll do the same. Hopefully we can distract it. Master… figure something out."

"We ought to just look at it," said Star Swirl, about halfway through a stride of mine and the beginning of Clover's. "Petrification can be reversed. Poisoning can't. The Sisters will come looking for us, that crystal filly—Silhouette—knows at least vaguely where we are, and then their alicorn magic will make short work of it."

"You're giving up?" I snapped, breaking into a sprint as the monster approached Star Swirl's position, and swiping a foreleg to fling as much dirt and debris backwards as I could.

"I'm being practical," said Star Swirl, as he lowered his horn to the floor and began scratching out a message in the dirt. "This trap is meant for us. And while I might be an old stallion on his last legs anyhow, petrification for the two of you is a far preferable solution to losing two of the brightest young mages of a generation… Clover, are there two 'L's in basilisk, or—"

Clover did me the decency of hefting a full sized rock in the frog of her hoof and hurling the thing at the basilisk as it slithered toward me. "Spelling is not important now, Master Star Swirl." The blow literally hit the creature's rattle, producing a very strange sound I won't attempt to onomatopize here. Then she continued "You obviously have some idea; I've known you too long not to hear it in yoru voice."

"The chamber it came out of," Star Swirl admitted, seemingly begrudgingly. "Magic will work there, since whatever enchantment opened the wall would otherwise have been nullified by the void crystals in the ceiling."

I made sure I heard the serpent off to my side before I looked up in the direction from which the beast had originally come. Sure enough, there was a little chamber—much more obviously worked stone than this larger cavern—which had no visible roof at all, but also no sign of void crystal.

"But if you get bit on the way over there, you will die. And I can't run. So as soon as I'm done with my message, I intend to look. I trust the two of you won't risk your lives if it gets too close."

"Right," I said. Then I picked up the most sizeable rock I could and flung it vaguely in Clover's direction, trusting that even blind I couldn't miss something roughly the size of a dozen farmer's wagons daisy-chained together.

The noise it made suggested I had hit it, and as I veered away from the noise, I heard Clover let out a gasped "Oh—!"

The problem with wizards is, all the cunning—all the 'cleverness', if you will—in the world doesn't make up for how stupid we can be when deprived of our preferred tools of borderline godlike power. Case in point: in trying to look out for my well being and see how close the basilisk was getting before she needed to throw another rock, Clover failed to account for the possibility that my scrawny wizards forelegs had hit the basilisk, but not hard enough to actually distract it, let alone to harm it enough to get its head to turn back on me.

For perhaps the only solid moment in the fight, Clover got a chance to take the basilisk in, in all its glory. Easily a hundred and twenty hooves long, and four or five in diameter on average, the great serpent was covered in huge green and yellow scales, more like those on a dragon than less magical snakes. Its tail, of course, ended in a rattle like a rattlesnake—although unlike a rattlesnake, this one was covered in red-gray spikes two to three hooves long, giving it the overall impression of an oversized morningstar. Jutting out from the front-middle of the snake were an octet of closely-grouped, stumpy, and mostly vestigial legs that resembled somewhat those you might find on an iguana or a komodo dragon. In nature (not that basilisks occur much in nature, owing to the relative infrequency of chickens sitting on even small snake eggs, let alone those of great jungle snakes to produce such a large specimen) the claws were useful for climbing, but generally held up off the ground when the creature was slithering on flat surfaces like the dirty floor of Wintershimmer's deathtrap.

Moving up from the forward-center and the legs, we would find the beginnings of a 'mane' of spines like those on mundane legged reptiles. This trail of spines culminated in a large crest, like that of a chameleon, atop the creature's head—the 'crown' which gave the creature the title of 'king of serpents'. Otherwise, beneath that crown, one would find a hood like a cobra, and a head shaped rather like that of the same more natural snake: a relatively short face, coming to a point, and a very wide mouth held open as it turned toward the source of the blow to its body. All this was framed beneath two brilliant emerald green eyes.

And seeing them—meeting their gaze—of course sealed Clover the Clever's fate.

The short exclamation I mentioned above was all she managed to get out before her mouth gave in to the rocky gray spreading down from her own eyes. Slowly, painstakingly, I lost my best chance of survival.

"Clover!" I shouted.

Star Swirl scoffed. "Calm down, Coil. It'll be alright. My sympathies for the boredom, though." As he spoke, calmly as if commenting on the weather, even as his own apprentice faced what might be a very slow and miserable path to oblivion (for uncured petrification in a cave somewhere, forgotten and abandoned, is a fate far, far worse than death), Star Swirl posed himself so his dangling broken hoof was pointing down at the chicken-scratch he'd carved in the floor. "Try your best to avoid our argument, while you've got some time to think. I've got a message here. I'm sure Celestia won't be long." With that, Star Swirl craned his neck awkwardly over his shoulder, something like pursed his lips, and let out a sharp and piercing whistle.

I don't know how much of what I said in reply was heard, as stone swept toward his ears, but I still shouted out "I'm glad Wintershimmer got to prove he was better than you one last time, you stubborn bastard."

And then I was alone with the serpent.

Comments

[CopperTop]

Oh boy, and now it's basically Morty vs Wintershimmer 2.0 from here on out...

It'll also be very interesting to see what Morty eventually finds. Knowing his old mentor, it'll either be an artifact of unimaginable power...

...Or an illusion of him performing a slow hoof clap giving Morty an "attacolt" for succeeding.

Also, I don't know why, but Star Swirl's "defiled her soul" line has me rolling! It almost feels like he'd have been less upset if Morty had actually slept with Clover or something XD

[RoboRed]

I saw the void crystals coming (or something to that effect) when Clover had a sharp cutoff when trying to scry/divine for more traps ahead. First thought instantly jumped to "void zone". Definitely didn't expect the basilisk, though.

...Also is it just me or does Wintershimmer seem to have a thing for petrification going on here? Or daresay petrification and poisoning? First there's the petrification trap spell and the miasma, then the basilisk with its natural petrifying abilities and venom...On the other hand, once is chance, twice is a coincidence...haven't quite secured "pattern" yet.

Quite the sticky situation now.

I stopped mid-stride, turned around to face the bearded old stallion, and for just a second I found myself on the verge of listing off mares of roughly my age who preferred my physique to his. Fortunately, a voice in the edge of my mind spoke up first.

"You will not enjoy comparing sexual exploits with Star Swirl," cautioned Wintershimmer's grim tone. "Or so I infer, given how hesitant you were to challenge me on similar grounds some time ago, when I still drew breath. Remember, the stallion is over a century in age. And Clover is his granddaughter, lest you forget; you know the stallion has had success in his personal affairs. Do not pick a losing fight."

I lol'd.