Tales from Everfree City

by LoyalLiar

14-5

XIV - V

The Monster Under An Adult's Bed

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

What you are about to read was performed by a trained professional under desperate circumstances. Do not try what you are about to read at home. I will not be held liable for some idiot thinking they can pull this stunt with a manticore or something, and stars help you if you find a basilisk to test your mettle against.

To reiterate the state of the battle: we were in a roughly circular cavern somewhere beneath the crystal spire. The ceiling of the cave was lined with most of the world's natural void crystal (at least, excepting the portal to Tartarus beneath Canterlot… but we'll get to that), suppressing all unicorn magic. A particularly large and venerable basilisk had emerged from a chamber on the far side of the room, which appeared to be removed enough from the void crystal in the main room to allow a mage to wield their magic—but getting to it would require outrunning the basilisk, and given it was big enough to swallow any of the three of us whole (and for those unfamiliar with monster hunting lore, landspeed almost always scales linearly with size), I'd only survive an attempt to outrun it once in a puce polka-dotted moon.

Clover the Clever had already fallen prey to bad luck (something I suspect she had forgotten happened to the rest of us who didn't just turn it off with magic), and Star Swirl had full-on given up to put his faith in being rescued by Celestia and/or Luna—perhaps justifiably given he broke his decrepit foreleg in the trap slide down into the cavern, but I still felt it was a cop out to put Celestia in danger, and I certainly wasn't going to trust Luna to rescue me.

I swept the floor of the chamber visually again, while holding my foreleg up to block line-of-sight between myself and the basilisk. It should be reiterated beyond any shadow of a doubt that I did not have a plan, and I was seriously considering Star Swirl's proposal not out of agreement but purely desperation. Before I fell to that level of defeat, though, my eyes fell on Wintershimmer's staff, which I'd lost my grip on when we fell on the trap-door see-saw slide apparatus. It was, at the absolute least, a weapon—even if the bone wasn't thick enough to insulate the magic animating the staff against the void crystal (a determination I had no way of making except by trying my luck), its teeth were still sharp, and more importantly it was still something resembling a polearm (perhaps a 'spinearm'?). But the most important and best quality of the staff was that it wasn't that far away.

Given the basilisk was already bearing down on me as the only still-animate prey it could see, and apparently having woken up from suspended animation hungry (or just being hungry because it was, for all its magic, a wild animal), I didn't stop to think if turning around and running back to where we had entered the chamber was a good idea; I just ran.

I heard the slithering behind me. I dove. Snap, behind my tail, as I skid on my belly on the rough stone (not an experience I recommend). My hooves touched the staff, but sent it skittering away. I clambered forward, throwing myself onto the dry off-white bones. One of the spines jutting from its back pierced my belly shallowly, but that was hardly a concern, compared to the imminent danger and pain I felt when the basilisk's bite on my tail hair yanked out more than a few of my precious blue-white strands.

The same motion yanked me backward, dragging me and the staff clutched to my chest about a stride back, and then in a failed attempt to snap its neck and toss me up into its mouth, instead flung me across the room. (Which is to say, I suspect losing hair from my tail threw off its aim and saved my life—however much life is worth with an ugly tail). If I hadn't had the staff's spines literally buried in my chest, I'm sure I would have dropped it as I landed. Instead, wheezing out what little I had of breath in my lungs from the impact back onto the stone floor, I pushed myself up on it, using it as a crutch in a way Wintershimmer never really had even despite his advanced age.

I highlight that metaphor in the moment because I contemplated the irony even in that live-or-death moment, and for my stray thought I earned a chastising voice in my mind.

"Shoulders and joints are not the hard parts of the body to bolster with magic, Coil. Focus on surviving. I saw something on the south wall; a stone out of place. Almost white; I'm not certain your conscious mind realized it."

It was an unusual comment, and were I not in the heat of focusing on not getting lethally poisoned, I might have dug on it further. As it was, my tongue ran on its own as I contemplated how to get across the room in any direction, and tried to figure how far I was from the basilisk's secret chamber where I could do magic (without just looking, since that was fraught with peril). "How in Tartarus do you expect me to know which side is south? Even if I hadn't just been thrown across the room, we got here through a portal."

"I suppose you just assumed the slide was facing north. Now—"

"No time," I snapped, as the rattle of the basilisk's tail and the coiling of the absolute lowest part of its body that I dared to let into my field of vision suggested it was rearing back for another strike.

That's when I had the idea. The most wonderful, terrible, staggeringly bad idea.

When I heard the snake's mouth hiss and I smelt its foul breath, I jumped.

Forward.

"What are you—?!"

Looking up was a necessary risk at that point; if I turned to stone… well, if I screwed up the jump, I was going to die either way, and at least stone would spare me the sensation of the pain. As it was, though, my timing was right; even if on an instinctual level, I knew what I was doing, and so instead of meeting the basilisk's gaze, my eyes saw the top of its open mouth and the two fangs literally dripping green venom that would probably spell my momentary death.

My forelegs soared over the shorter lower fangs of the so-called king of serpents, and as I lunged, I thrust Wintershimmer's staff forward. The dragon skull met soft palate, spines and spikes digging into vibrant red flesh. I hardly had time to look at it, though, before my free forehoof met a forked tongue, and I had to awkwardly pull myself further forward into the mouth. As I did, I rammed the 'tail' of the staff forward. Even if the void crystal in the room hadn't been sapping at least some measure of the enchantments on the bones, I had no doubt the sheer mass of muscle behind the snake's jaws was enough to crunch through the most magically fortified of bones. I had no false hope the staff holding open the beast's mouth to keep its fangs out of my exposed torso was a permanent solution. I only needed it for just as long as it gave me: time enough to scramble past the surely lethal, poisoned fangs and into the basilisk's throat.

"Coil, it… oh!"

I didn't acknowledge Wintershimmer's ghost aloud; the sound of the groaning and then snapping of bone and alchemically preserved cartilage behind me, combined with the sudden sensations of darkness and crushing peristalsis, meant I had no particular breath with which to hold an academic debate.

However, something else interesting happened at the moment that the basilisk closed its mouth. Namely, I suddenly became fully insulated from the void crystals in the cavern ceiling, thanks to walls of fairly thick flesh all around me. That meant that, though it was piercingly painful and tiring, I did get the satisfaction of a brilliant and white stable blue glow around my horn when I focused up my magic.

Basilisks are not sapient creatures, and so do not possess souls; the Razor would be of no help to me. That being said, Wintershimmer and I had been killing non-sapient monsters since I was old enough to remember—and for all its offensive prowess and size, a basilisk isn't especially complicated by traits like natural regeneration or amorphous anatomy. It was even a reptile, and therefore a vertebrate. Further, I had one of the most purely powerful horns in the living world, and it happened to be only a (relatively) thin layer of muscles removed from directly touching one of the basilisk's vertebrae.

An abrupt and audibly snapping rotation of just one disc of its spinal column very near the base of its skull in place by a full three hundred sixty degree cycle was enough to instantly paralyze the monster, while also tearing enough surrounding flesh and vital central arteries to induce internal bleeding that would see the beast dead by the time I physically fought my way back out of its mouth.

"Star Swirl's plan was better than yours," Wintershimmer's voice arrived in my ear, chiding. "But I commend the efficacy with which you enacted your plan."

"Please…" I gagged briefly, as even the very minor way with which I moved my mouth to answer meant I briefly tasted the inside of the basilisk. I refrained from continuing my thought for a moment as I pushed forward, until I got back into the 'mouth' of the creature. There, rather than risk poisoning myself even on its still fangs, I slipped out the side of its cheek, pausing only to take the largest shards of Wintershimmer's staff with me. "…you were literally the pony who taught me I had an ethical obligation as a wizard not to shuffle my problems off on other ponies."

"The Sisters absolutely carry the onus of mages, even if they don't bother with titles. If they did not, allowing them to aid in your battles against me would have been reprehensible." Wintershimmer sighed. "The stone is to your left now, by Star Swirl."

Even when I took a deep breath to center myself and focused my memory, I couldn't place seeing it. It was a tiny thing, too; easy enough to miss even for somepony actively searching for it. If Wintershimmer's voice hadn't called it out, even if I had seen it, I would probably have inspected the basilisk's chamber first for a way out. But when my hoof so much as grazed the rock, another segment of the cavern's wall ground open, revealing a staircase back up in what I assumed was a rough parallel to the slide which had left us in peril in the first place.

"Well, that's convenient," I noted. "Any recommendations from the back of my own mind on what to do now? Even if it weren't for the void crystals, I don't exactly want to burn out my horn picking the two of them up."

"Leave them down here and continue on." Wintershimmer replied. "If you make it out of this place alive, you ought to be able to get my research back without Star Swirl in the way."

"You want me to effectively kill Star Swirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever?" I asked, before rolling my eyes. "Right… you directly asked me to in life."

"I am, in this moment, merely the voice of the convenient ego. You could always come back for them later. Better, I think, to find a way out of this place, fetch a petrification cure from among my tonics, and return to solve this problem alchemically. If anything, now you have the guarantee Star Swirl will not try to abscond with or censor my treasures." Wintershimmer nodded toward the stairs. "So now we must hope I did not place more traps that require magic to bypass."

"Either that, or I sleep down here…" I shuddered at the thought. "Right, let's see what's next."

The stairs, which I walked extremely gingerly, led up to the original hallway just past the point where the floor had tipped away. In the other direction, beyond a smooth curve in the hall, just out of sight of where we had fallen, I found another door—this one inscribed with a tiny plaque, and guarded by a walkway of stone bricks that had each been carved with a single magical glyph.

This is my greatest creation, read the plaque.

"Oh. Joy," I muttered aloud, actively thinking about the ghost of my mentor somewhere in the recesses of my mind. "I hate that this is actually really clever of you."

"If it were clever of me, and not the real Wintershimmer," said my figment "Then surely I could just tell you which of my works I consider to be my most respectable. What do you think?"

"It's gotta be the candlecorns, right?"

"'Gotta'?" Wintershimmer asked, as if I had dishonored him. "And not my work with the Summer Lands?"

"Was that supposed to be rhetorical? I know you were already using this place long before we finished and tested that spell."

"You should also recall, though, that work on it started long before I took you on as an apprentice. After all, it was part of how I handled framing Vow for my attack on Jade and Smart Cookie, and kept Smart Cookie's soul from being caught by Celestia or Luna."

"Huh…" I had a particular and very deep thought at this moment, but I don't want to explain it just yet. "Well, that does make things tricky, doesn't it? Maybe you're right. The only other option is the Razor, as useful as it can be, it doesn't even work on the most dangerous monsters and spirits we might have to fight. As we observed with the changelings…"

"Something bothering your mind, Coil? I can only hear your active thoughts when you focus on making them… I suppose 'audible' is as good a metaphor as any."

"Just trying to recollect the way the ritual's glyph notation starts." I continued to speak aloud as I reached out to the stones. "Tripartite nested septagraph. Seven upon seven upon seven points." Click click went two corresponding stones. "Candela's Stabilizing Retrograde Impulse… And then it should move on to Rapid Transit's Portal to Shangri-La."

"No!" Wintershimmer called out, fully materializing as he desperately tried to stop my hoof from landing on the offending tile.

I chuckled, hovering my hoof in the air a moment and then sliding it over to the tile that I knew I was skipping all along. "I remember," I said aloud. "You thought Ferry's Aerie was the ideal initial portal mechanism before we improved it."

Wintershimmer's ghost staggered back in the air. "You remembered—?"

I tapped down my hoof on what I knew was the correct next stone. "But I also know I was thinking very, very hard about our version of the ritual."

"Why? I… Surely you didn't risk your life on a spur-of-the-moment whim, Coil?"

"I wasn't going to lower my hoof, so it was hardly a risk." With two more taps, I was satisfied to watch the door before me begin to open. "You tried to warn me when I was fighting the changelings back in the schoolhouse with Graargh and Cherry. You knew that when the changeling turned into me, and I tried to use the razor on him, the spell would sever my soul instead of his. And I had no way of knowing that in advance; I didn't know you had any connection to the changelings until that day. Then in the basilisk's den, you tried to pass off the stone as something I subconsciously noted, but when I actually found the stone in question… that's quite a stretch, isn't it? Add to that slipping up by knowing which way south is, and I start to put together a fairly damning conclusion. Despite your claims, that you do have information I don't, and that you aren't just some kind of 'soul hallucination'."

Wintershimmer's ghostly form 'sublimated' fully into being before me. "And?"

I raised my hoof and gesticulated prodding him in the chest, even if without a physical body it mostly served for visual effect. "Well, you might as well spit it out; what's going on? Is you being in my head—"

"Soul," Wintershimmer corrected.

I rolled my eyes in frustration. "That level of nuance isn't exactly an answer."

That earned me a sigh, but one rather less reflecting disappointment and more a rare sort of fatigue the old stallion had occasionally expressed in life. "If I could skip to the point, Coil, I would. As it stands, nuance is the best I can offer you in lieu of a straight answer."

"You don't know?" I asked.

Wintershimmer shook his head, almost mournfully. "Since this appears to be a challenging conversation for both of us, I am going to expound my observations, and you are going to listen, Coil. Doubt them, if you must, but at least doubt quietly; perhaps when I am done, you will see the truth of this; perhaps even better than I can. But first, go in. The door will open for you now. There are many treasures inside, but to start with, I recommend Comet's reading chair."

"Your teacher's chair?" I asked with a raised brow. "Is it enchanted somehow? Will it help me understand?"

Wintershimmer didn't grin; he never really grinned. But the spectral wrinkles of his right cheek tightened in a way that suggested, even if only barely, that a body with less atrophied smiling muscles might have turned the corner of its lips upward. "It heats and massages the back, and it is extremely comfortable. And it does not stain or smell, no matter what you spill on it. I had many a difficult conversation with my old mentor while she sat in that chair, and I have no doubt it will serve you just as well for the conversation we need to have now."

I scoffed, even as I pushed open the door. "You kept a magic chair down here and all it does is feel comfy to sit in? Wouldn't it be better up in…"

The sight of the chamber beyond stole the words from my mouth.

It wasn't that it was huge, or unnatural in any meaningful way; the walls were the same smoothed but still obviously cavernous stone as the hallway behind me. Nor were its accouterments especially improbable; they mostly consisted of two rows of simple oak shelves and a couple of dedicated glass cases.

It was the contents of the cases, and the books and baubles on the shelves, which stole my attention. There must have been a thousand books crammed onto the shelves, and as many scrolls besides. Hanging from prongs on the pillars of the shelves were staves and rods and wands, some of which I suspected I recognized from Wintershimmer's lectures on the history of magic. Horrifyingly, my eyes picked out a wooden handle attached to Archmage Pallid the Peer's severed horn; an artifact that had come to be called the Pallid Wand. Set on their own shelf, I spotted a half-dozen crystal balls and half-again as many scrying bowls and mirrors and braziers. Bottles of preserved monster parts that each represented an improbable danger to harvest—and one or two of which I remembered assisting in bottling myself—filled another shelf.

More to the point, in between two shelves, and quite near the one full of books, I saw a red upholstered reading chair, complete with a standalone hoofrest of the same scarlet fabric. I had to reflect, a few moments later, that Archmage Comet had impeccable taste in furniture.

When I was settled, Wintershimmer's 'ghost' appeared to me again. "Now, as I said, I will tell you what I know. Let me start from the beginning—which is to say, my end.

"My plan was the plan you managed to thwart. I did not waste my time crafting a backup strategy; I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would either conquer one of the so-called 'goddesses', or I would be destroyed. Now, I fully admit the possibility of being destroyed by you and not one of them was… not a consideration I entertained much until just before the end, but the horn that dealt the blow was hardly of concern to my conclusion. I would win, or I would die. The possibility of a stalemate where I walked away unsuccessful but alive was not a possibility worth entertaining."

I leaned back into the spectral affections of the enchanted chair, but you should know that for all the relaxation of my body, my mind was alert for deception on Wintershimmer's part. For all my searching, at least in those words, I found none.

"Even if I had such a plan, though, it would surely have involved the use of magic through my horn—a power that the new queen's quick work with her blade denied me. I spoke to you in total honesty that day in my cell beneath Everfree. My congratulations on your success, my warning against taking an Archmage's seat too early… my frustration at your insistence on that mewling little speech about the nature of heroism… all of that was true. Indeed, something you will find if you think back is that for all my skill in a mage's duel, I am not a very convincing liar without the benefit of forethought. You would have seen through me if I had tried to deceive you. I had no other plan, and with a dispersed soul, I would never see the rewards of my legacy in training you achieve fruition.

"After you dispersed me—or whatever it was you did that we both believed to have been dispersing my soul, I found myself here, trapped in your soul. Reduced to a passenger, if not a parasite. I don't know how that came to pass, or what the longer term effects will be. To start in Everfree, your soul and your magic were at peace, and I could do nothing but watch silently through your eyes. I only gained the ability to manifest myself audibly and visually as you both released more reckless use of mana, and found your soul in more churning, troubling emotional states. I assume that is the reason I was finally able to appear to you, following your diagnosis; either that, or discussion or thought of me empowered me. It is hard to measure or test such things without your conscious consent—and given your lack of control over your emotions, this new consciousness of the situation may thwart further experiments in other ways. But that is a concern for later.

"What I do know is this: just as you correctly warned the elder Queen Platinum before seancing King Lapis, a soul in want of a brain struggles to recall many pieces of pure trivia and information. I do have access to a brain of sorts, but it is yours and not my own, and I only have access to its spare energy and its idle archives of memory. I can warn you of things that were of great importance to the stallion I was in life, but I cannot—to choose a prescient example—recite all thirty pages of my research to graft a new horn onto your head purely from the memory of my soul. What I can do is offer limited counsel on those things I am able to remember in this fragmented, partial existence—such as the lesson I learned several decades ago, about the interaction between a so-called 'changeling's shapeshifting and the targeting mechanics of what you've come to call my 'Razor'."

Wintershimmer then sat down in midair and nodded to me. "So, Coil… do you have thoughts on this situation? Questions you would ask your old master? Perhaps a hypothesis?"

I nodded, leaning forward in the archmage's chair and steepling my hooves. "Why lie in the first place?"

"In one part, because I did not fully understand this state of affairs myself, and it seemed the best path to continue my existence. Compounding that, when I first appeared to you, you were in such a heightened emotional state that I felt some risk you might take foolish action to try and disperse me again—without considering how likely such an action might be to also disperse your soul. And most importantly: because no matter how difficult you make it, and how my state as pure soul in want of a brain of pure logical willpower makes it, if I continue to mentor you and mold you to be more like myself, I am doing a disservice to the reality of the relationship that we had, and your triumph in how it ended."

I couldn't help but cock a brow. "Really? I…" I sighed. "Look, we both know I'm not a full archmage yet, right? That was your whole point—"

"You are better than this fickleness, Coil." Wintershimmer let out a little breath, a sort of implication of a chuckle. "How often did I rail against your ego, to now long for it as the far better alternative to this rampaging self-pity? First in the lounge and now here. Hmph. But I sense this is difficult for you. It is difficult for me also. Make no mistake: I relish getting to see your progress, but I would rather embrace oblivion and know I was not a burden on your future than loom over you in perpetuity. Even if you had not given so much credit to my mentorship, or my… the 'fatherhood' that you verge upon alluding to with Celestia, I would still not want not want to be at the forefront of your growth. You have exceeded the need for me. I have become an anchor. That was the foremost reason I lied."

"Bullshit," I answered.

Wintershimmer raised a brow. "Gale—that is, Her Majesty—is damaging manners that were exceptionally hard to instill in a foal growing up amongst barbarians. But I am telling you the truth; that is my foremost motivation, whether you believe me or not."

I rolled my eyes. "I believe you, Master. I'm telling you that you're factually wrong. You think there isn't more I could have learned from you? Tartarus, whatever books I get out of this vault, I know I'm still going to be learning from you. You were the best duelist in the world for, what, seventy years?"

"Closer to eighty," Wintershimmer noted. "I wrote what you now call the Razor at nineteen… though it was substantially less refined than its current form. And dueling other wizards is hardly—"

"How do you think that's the part I care about?" I beat a hoof against my forehead, and then sighed. "Maybe this is what everypony else complains about with me. In any other context, I'd be demanding to know more about how you figured that out at barely past my age. But that's not the point now. Master, if you hadn't flown completely off the handle and tried to steal godhood, I'd be more than happy to still be learning under you."

"You wouldn't have gotten much out of me, Coil."

"I know you were getting old, but the ritual would have made extending your life any number of ways trivial."

"Ah, a practical lesson." Wintershimmer nodded. "I had intended to teach you 'the Razor' before I sent you on your way after Clover, after we had refined the ritual and tested it at least a few more times. For all the credit your mind tells me that you give me about my plan, you fail to consider that almost every step was an improvisation upon an earlier preparation I had made for a wholly different reason. The root cause of those cascading failures was a heart attack at some uncivilized hour of the morning, the day that I framed you for my murder."

I raised a brow. "You were already dead when that whole mess started? From square one?"

"I had so hoped to live long enough to break your infuriating linguistic tendency to treat life and death as a binary. But yes, were I any other pony, I would have died in the most basic sense that morning."

"And it was really all just to extend your lifespan? To avoid death?"

At that, Wintershimmer scowled. "No. And now I will take offense. If I had wanted to put my hooves behind my head and enjoy my days in the Summer Lands, the Sisters' opinions of my philosophy would have not mattered whatsoever; it was well within my power to circumvent them, as you well know. They had no idea I was even dead until you mentioned it. No, I conspired to seize divinity because it was my ethical obligation."

"Do I need to say—"

"'Bullshit' is not a term of debate, Coil. You asked the question in good faith, at least let me answer it uninterrupted. I am—I was—Wintershimmer the Complacent. I won that title in the public eye because I spared Star Swirl and went into exile when I could have slain him and either subdued or supplanted Lapis to rule the Diamond Kingdoms. But I wore that title willingly and with… if not pride, then at least 'nobility' because I, and with Archmage Comet's passing, I alone, still believe in the ethical principles underpinning the understanding of wizardry from which that title was derived… Well, there is an argument to be made that Hurricane of all ponies shares my philosophy de facto, even if he does so in ignorance of our history, but we shall get to that. You already know these, but I shall reiterate them to build my point"

"Firstly, it is a wizard's duty to accumulate power, and to use it to help the weak—en masse, lest you remind me of my hypocrisy in using innocents for mana at Platinum's Landing; I am well aware. Secondly, willing stagnation is the same as the abandonment of power—an ethical failing. Thirdly, power which is not used does not exist. And lastly, a wizard can only lay down their duty when they train somepony else to replace them, or if they lose their ability in the furtherance of their duty.

"Necromancy as an apprentice taught me of the factual existence of the Sisters. A youth spent watching knights die in wars against the then-mostly-ununified crystal barbarians made me idly wonder why they were so distant, but they may as well have been psychopomps or spirits as ponies. My exile forced me to confront the worst horrors of the crystals first-hoof. For all the wickedness of the barbarians, theirs is a lifestyle which cuts away foalish illusions like Star Swirl's idea that we have somehow evolved beyond the need for the wizard-as-monster-slayer. I was sorely tempted to wipe the sub-equine lot of them off the world, and I confess at the time only the practicality of limited mana truly stopped me. But with more time for inward philosophy and few options for intelligent conversation, I turned my thoughts to why, for centuries, our factual goddesses permitted these crimes to continue in the land of the living. I was hardly the first wizard-philosopher to wonder so, and I contented myself to reading the writings of the Wise Kings and our forebears whenever I saved a library from burning in a crystal raid. Then came the pegasi, and the stories of a literal hostile god… stories I all but instantly assumed were true; after all, if us, why not the griffons? But that lit a fire. So much of our prior philosophy hinged on the idea that the Sisters had to keep themselves distant. But if Magnus would go to war for his subjects, why not the Sisters?

"So, when I had a chance, I arranged a meeting with Hurricane. My sincere hope was that he would put my questions, my worries, at ease. Instead, his answers only strengthened my conviction that ours were gods in dereliction of their duty—that, or false gods altogether. I began to suspect, as I voiced in our duels, that the Sisters—and this Magnus—were not ponies at all, but some spirits, perhaps not as wantonly evil as the Centaur or the Draconequus, but hardly benevolent. Perhaps chaos, or war, or death served their purposes, feeding them or strengthening them. I only learned after the fact that when Star Swirl and Clover and their gargoyle had sought us for their team, in the memory you pried from Clover's soul, that the Sisters were amongst them. Perhaps it will be some small amusement to you that, despite your accusations of my misrepresenting her as a warlock, I did not so much seek to deceive you about her character as I disbelieved that Clover could be so stupid and so trusting. But no matter; knowing that only more proves my point. After that incident came the Windigos… and though Celestia and Luna had intervened before, they let the Diamond Kingdoms fall."

"So you're mad they weren't using their powers enough?"

"What did I say about interruptions? But yes, ultimately. Though not until I learned more of their natures. And now that I know yet more… I was half right. Celestia I understood at the time to be exactly the sort the Complacency of the Learned condemned: dithering out of fear of her own power. Having overheard her story through your ears, I see there is more wisdom to her restraint than I had gleaned second-hoof, though I still think hers is a damnation of inaction. Luna, by contrast, flaunts her deity constantly, and yet is either staggeringly incompetent in its use against any real threat—per the aforementioned cases—or worse, as Hurricane alluded to only once, the one time I got even a word from him—her 'Loyalty' lies not with ponykind at all.

"Either way, just as it is the right of any wizard to challenge a seated archmage, and in victory to take both their title and their responsibilities—and they are in the ethical right to do so—godhood seems like a natural next step. If I could take godhood from one of the Sisters—and in doing so, end eternal winter, or prevent the fall of Cirra, or stop the tyranny of whatever next great threat tries to topple yet another of our beacons of civilization in a state of brutal nature, is that not worth the life of one mare who has already had eight thousand to live? Or, what, a few dozen peasants in some swamp?"

"I had almost forgotten how far you leaned into evil."

"I had almost forgotten the word 'hero', Coil. Shall we dwell in mutual disappointment, or get on with our lives? My point is this: you might disagree with me on the finer points of this philosophy: how many innocent casualties are permissible for the trade, per se, but given the things you have said about Star Swirl, and in confronting the wizard suitor whose name I am sure neither of us remembers, or even in defending yourself before any number of comers, I think we see the broad strokes in agreement. That being said: everypony is a hypocrite, as I observed yesterday, but I have tried to at least follow the rules that I set forth to describe of myself. One of those rules is that, by besting me, you have proven the superiority of your perspective on morality. And I do intend to yield to that. So do not take this as an attempt to persuade you… although in truth I do not know if it is persuasion so much as capability that keeps you from toppling Luna."

"I am tempted sometimes, yes, Master."

"You are not that strong. Not yet, at any rate. I encourage you to ponder my perspective, now that you know my final stance, but I will not try to win you over to it further. To do so, as I said, would be to make myself an anchor when I should instead not exist."

"One question, though, Master—"

"Coil, you won. You need not call me that anymore. My given name will do just fine."

"If you call me 'Morty'."

"I see 'Master' is your preference then. What is your question?"

"You were happy Celestia took me on as her apprentice. Was that just to make sure I didn't take the court mage's seat here in the Union? Weren't you worried I'd be tempted not to use what power I earned from her?"

"Coil, at eighteen and with barely a third of a decent plan, you fought Wintershimmer the Complacent to the death, more than once, in full knowledge of what each of those words implies. You did that because you thought it was the right thing to do. Do I really have even the remotest glimmer of a reason to believe you would ever not use any power you accumulated for a cause you believed was ethical? I would as soon gamble on the moon falling from the sky."

I bit my cheek, not totally sure about the compliment, but I offered a nod. Finally, I found words. "I… Honestly, even with the duel, I think I'm glad to have you. We'll have to figure out what this means for… seances, and if I should tell Vow or Gale or Celestia."

I heard Wintershimmer derisively snort. "Vow, almost certainly—he will likely be furious, though he is too good a liar to show it even without a smooth wooden face. Her Majesty, I would not. And Celestia… will find out eventually, inevitably. She sees more than you think, Coil. She may not be my equal in a straightforward duel, and she may disparage herself in comparison to Luna, but I suspect she would be the foremost magical power on the earth, save for our earlier tenet—that power unused does not exist."

"For now though, there's just one last question: is this a stable state? Do I need to worry about having you up there… damaging me?"

Though he wasn't a mirthful stallion even on the best of days, there was a hint of self satisfaction when, without moving legs or horn, Wintershimmer lowered the height at which he was hovering to be ever so slightly below my eyeline.

"I cannot say for certain. It is something we shall have to study, likely with Vow's assistance in some regard. For now, my best answer is to look for a suitable metaphor in other situations of nature where two souls are within a single body. To that, I point you to the example of Yazigald."

"Yazigald?" I frowned. "I know that I know that name, but it isn't coming to me."

"You do, but since I have already retrieved that part of your memory, I shall spare you the need to play with mnemonics to try and pull up the thought. Yazigald was half of an ettin."

"A two-headed yak? Am I remembering that right?"

Wintershimmer nodded slowly. "Correct. Ettins are rare magically empowered, two-headed yak. Like most calves born with abnormalities in the harsh lack of civilization north even of here, ettins were most often killed at birth. Yazigald's mother was generous—by the unenviable barbarity of the yaks, at any rate—and beheaded one of her son's two heads, and then cauterized the stump in the hopes her child might survive. And he did. To cut further to the point, Yazigald became a respected warrior, conquered his way past the crystals, and ultimately attacked Emerald Orchard in the north of the Diamond Kingdoms. There, he fought Archmage Tam Brine, who I am certain you recollect by name."

It was my turn to nod. "Tam Brine, 'the good lich'."

"Indeed," said Wintershimmer. "As was the Archlich's custom, feeding her immortality only on the souls of 'monsters' instead of bolstering her undeath with innocents, Tam slew Yazigald—and was startled to find that the soul he left behind was akin to what his body had been: two partially merged souls. She hypothesized in her writings that because the body of the ettin was still alive after the loss of one of the two heads, the soul of the other head—I assume you have already inferred this, but ettins normally have two souls—the soul of the other head never actually left the body; it just became a sort of passenger. Over time, Archmage Brine studied this hybrid soul, and found that it continued to grow united over time."

"So… I'm going to become more like you?"

"If Brine was right, it would appear likely. However, you need not concern yourself. In this relationship, yours is the stronger soul—I suspect the only complete one—and will without doubt remain the dominant personality. Perhaps you will become more practical or less egotistical—but then, those are hardly reasons to complain."

I nodded. "Either that, or I try and pull you out?"

"And risk dispersing your own soul in the process? While I agree with you utterly on the subject of the risk in transplanting a horn, and that Star Swirl is as usual being an obstinate naysayer of progress and change, this is a risk you would be wise not to undertake without much greater understanding. The difference is that I will aid you in pursuing that understanding, instead of hindering you with fears of a future that will never come. Now, that was the last trap. Let us see what of my possessions remain in this vault."

"Why didn't you hide your candlecorn in this vault?" I asked. "I'm not sure Gale and Celestia and I could have gotten through those traps."

"This vault was enormously painful to access even for me, by design. There isn't some secret passage that bypasses the gas trap or the serpent king or the puzzle in the floor just there. I had the advantage of knowing what all the traps were, but I still had to teleport and sneak and tap the code on the floor, the same as you and the other two. This vault was for items I wanted protected—or wanted to protect the world from—but which I needed only very rare access to."

"You really didn't have a secret bypass?"

"Had I, Clover would surely have stumbled onto it with her manufactured 'luck'. An imbecile though she might be with regards to her sympathy for dark spirits, I suspect she may have surpassed Star Swirl's usefulness to the world." Wintershimmer's 'ghost' turned in midair to observe the shelves, then nodded sagely. "There is a jam to prevent the slide that drops one into the cavern where I stuck the basilisk. I advise we set that, leave, and return with the candlecorn you brought, and possibly Silhouette."

"Hopefully she's found an answer for me," I muttered.

Wintershimmer turned to me rather directly. "Oh, yes. I suppose, now that I am no longer pretending, I should just tell you. Your father was Sir Circa, the Earl of Lichdale. Your romantic interest may need to correct me, but I believe that makes you the 'His Lordship, the Right Honorable Mortal Coil'."

"You're joking me…" I threw my head back and let out a small groan.

Wintershimmer nodded. "I'm afraid that's it, Coil. You've lost. You're to swear your loyalty to Grand Duchess Chrysoprase, and she will no doubt both order you to cease your pursuit of Her Majesty's hoof, and find you a backwater domain well out-of-reach of Everfree City. I hope, in time, you will regard this as a lesson, that you are no longer tempted to throw away your life in pursuit of physical pleasure."

"You think I want her for physical pleasure?!" I snapped.

The old wizard nodded. "You will rarely hear me sympathizing or agreeing with an empathovore or an insect, but even a broken sundial can be right once a day, if enough of the gnomon remains. What you feel for the queen is animal lust and misplaced friendship, and those things will not survive the trials that litter the path Vow has prescribed for you. Further, I suspect that he would admit the same himself, were he not quietly terrified that if he did, you would return him to the depths of Tartarus."

I waved my hoof through the air. "Like you know anything about friendship."

To my surprise, Wintershimmer dignified that little outburst with an uncharacteristic rebuttal. "I have been betrayed by better friends than you will ever make, Coil."

Comments

[ZeroMonkey]

This chapter was awesome. I really liked learning more about Wintershimmer and his perspective on things.

[CopperTop]

Some hard truths from Wintershimmer; who's certainly mellowed out a lot more now that he's dead...

[DoctorWhoooves]

Now we know Morty's dad... Things are about to get interestinger

[Farenth Vega]

Quite the twist having the 'ghost' be wintershimer's actual soul, though not an unwelcome one. I always liked the old stallion's twisted though sometimes sensible logic. Even if he's wrong he gives you something to think about. It'll be nice to have him around in a hopefully less dangerous form. Great chapter!

[Sweetblue]

To be honest, Celestia choosing student named "Mortal Coil" and then giving him a pint of her blood? She cannot really blame anyone else but herself when broken and damned souls start returning from left and right.

[RoboRed]

Yeah, I was getting the feeling more and more that wasn't exactly some manifestation of Morty's thoughts but actually Wintershimmer. That was made especially more apparent towards the end. "Convenient ego" of one's own doesn't exactly have convenient knowledge of bearings or object details in pitch darkness. Nice catch by Morty on him there.

Interesting twist of fate to have Wintershimmer end up like that. At least he seems to have mellowed out a bit?

Now we know who Morty's real dad is. It'll be interesting to see the fallout from that once they get out of there.

You're to swear your loyalty to Grand Duchess Chrysoprase, and she will no doubt both order you to cease your pursuit of Her Majesty's hoof, and find you a backwater domain well out-of-reach of Everfree City. I hope, in time, you will regard this as a lesson, that you are no longer tempted to throw away your life in pursuit of physical pleasure.

Yeah but Morty actually stopping his pursuit of Gale's hoof? Like hell that's gonna happen.

[Raugos]

Ooh, wasn't expecting the vore scene reveal about Wintershimmer.

I found myself here, trapped in your soul. Reduced to a passenger,

This is gonna make any physically intimate relationships real awkward from now on, isn't it?