12 - The Way Back
The hole in her side had definitely shrunk. Previously, Catskill could fit her hoof inside it with a little pushing. Now, it took a lot of pushing and some stretching of flesh. Hmm.
Maybe Bitterroot’s out-there allegation that Amanita had tried to help her was right after all.
Catskill strode outside into the remains of the blizzard. Most of the clouds had been blown away and it wasn’t snowing anymore. She took a deep breath in, paying extra attention to her sensations. Nothing out of the ordinary. Double hmm. Her nerves seemed to be working awfully well, considering they were dead.
She looked down the street. The end was several hundred yards away. After a second’s thought, Catskill shot towards it at the fastest gallop she could muster. She expected her legs to start burning before she’d gone ten yards, but they didn’t. They didn’t feel like she was working them at all. She was absolutely tireless, able to gallop at top speed all day.
Apparently, there were some perks to being dead.
Catskill reached the end of the street and skidded to a halt, throwing up a plume of snow. She spun around and galloped straight back to the mill. No weariness. No pain. No nothing.
Trace was waiting at the door to the mill, jaw agape. As a smiling Catskill slowed from a gallop to a trot to a walk to a stop, Trace said incredulously, “By crumb, you aren’t even breathing heavily. Holy crow.”
“I guess the dead don’t need to breathe,” said Catskill. She wiggled her hooves one at a time. No problems. “To… be honest,” she admitted, “if I’d been told straight up that I was dead, this wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Ah… no?”
“No. Like, ninety percent of the time. I feel normal. But I don’t get tired. I don’t feel pain. I don’t need to breathe. I don’t think I even need to eat.” Although, hadn’t Amanita given her that bread and juice? And it’d sat fine in her stomach. Maybe, if there was magic still healing her, it used the energy of the food to work.
“Very interesting.” Trace walked over and prodded at Catskill’s wound. She slapped Trace away. Undaunted, Trace continued, “So do you think Bitterroot was right in her assumption? About Amanita?”
Catskill sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe if I knew her better, but my only interaction with her before we entered the mill was attempting to kill her and attempting to not get killed by her.” (Trace cringed and folded her ears back.) “How long have you worked with her? What do you think?”
“I’ve only worked with her a few days,” said Trace, “but I’m fairly confident in saying she’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s alert, intelligent, she keeps her temper under control-”
“Like the time she threatened to kill Artemis?”
“-she usually keeps her temper under control,” amended Trace, “— and trust me,” she added in a lower voice, “a few days with Arty would put anypony at the end of their rope — and she avoids distractions. I’d’ve certainly never put all those pieces together like she did. So I’m willing to go out on a limb and say she’s mostly right.”
Mostly right. Catskill was willing to take “mostly”. But what was she going to say to Amanita, assuming Bitterroot was right? “Thanks for saving my life. Even if it meant turning me into a zombie.” “Couldn’t you have told me earlier?” “I think I deserve to know when I actually die.” “Liar.” A hundred and one emotions were swimming through her head, all jockeying for position, none of them willing to give an inch.
Of course, Bitterroot being right was the best-case scenario. Maybe it was too much to ask for out here.
Artemis walked out of the mill, glanced up at the sky, and scowled. “Bitterroot still ain’t back?” she muttered to nopony in particular.
“It hasn’t even been a quarter of an hour, Arty,” said Trace lightly. “She needs time.”
“Don’t call me ‘Arty’,” growled Artemis. She walked back into the mill. She attempted to slam the door behind her, but the broken latch meant the door bounced off the frame and swung open again.
“What stick’s up her butt?” asked Catskill. “First the… thing in the mill, now this…”
“I think she’s just one of those ponies, you know?” Trace waved a hoof airily. “They were born with the stick up their butt, through no fault of their parents, and all surgical attempts to remove it have failed. They think ‘realist’ and ‘miserable twat’ are synonyms.”
“Right.” Catskill was aware that she’d been somewhat like that in the past, but hoped it’d never been as bad as Artemis. “And you’ve been working with her for two days?”
Trace grimaced and nodded sadly.
“I am so sorry.”
The time passed slowly. Eventually, Catskill got tired of testing the limits of her deadness. There were only so many things she could find that were different from being alive. (Trace had joked that she could win any staring contest in the world, now, but Catskill was more interested in marathons.) And as the minutes dragged on with no sign of Bitterroot, Catskill couldn’t help feeling worried. Now that she thought about it, “finding a necromancer and having a friendly chat with her” was kind of a stupid plan. But she held her breath (even though that meant nothing, now).
Catskill was finishing yet another circuit of the mill when Artemis stomped outside again. She glowered up at the sky like it’d cut in front of her at the grocery store. “We gotta get movin’!” she yelled at Catskill and Trace. “Ev’ry second we sit ’ere, Amanita gets further away, an’-”
“Don’t you trust Bitterroot?” asked Trace, staring at the few clouds left in the sky. “Give her fifteen more minutes.”
“She’s been gone too long,” said Artemis. “We need t’go now. She could be dead. ’R worse.”
“Fifteen minutes, Arty, then we can go.”
“Cut it out wi’ the ‘Arty’,” growled Artemis. She stomped back into the mill.
Although Catskill couldn’t deny that she was also a bit apprehensive about Bitterroot’s continued absence, more than that, Artemis’s continued intrusions were getting on her nerves. Bitterroot had told them to keep quiet about the real reason she was gone, sure, but now Artemis couldn’t do anything about it and the truth might get her to shut up. Or at least stew in silence. It was hard to tell.
But if they were leaving in fifteen minutes and Artemis was still angry, she might channel that frustration into going downriver more quickly. Hmm.
Worth a shot. “Should we tell her about Bitterroot’s theory?” Catskill whispered to Trace.
“I say you’re welcome to if you want,” Trace muttered. “Personally, I’m not going anywhere near that, not with her temper. If you got her order wrong in a restaurant, she’d probably rip your head off.”
Not that much of an exaggeration, Catskill thought. But, still. If it’d shut up Artemis… Deep breath. Catskill walked into the mill. Artemis was mumbling something to Gale, who was nodding in response. “Artemis?” asked Catskill.
Artemis didn’t look up. “Yeh?” she grunted.
“Bitterroot thinks Amanita’s not as bad as she was made out to be.”
“She destroyed a village,” said Artemis in a low voice. “Good ’nough for me.”
Catskill blinked and flinched. She hadn’t heard that. But that didn’t seem right for Amanita. She hadn’t even been able to fend off a bear. Maybe maybe maybe there was something else involved. She plowed on, incredibly grateful Artemis wasn’t looking at her and couldn’t see her face. “But she didn’t enslave me when she had the perfect opportunity,” she said.
“So?” Artemis was a very grunty sort of pony.
“So Bitterroot thinks Amanita might be trying to turn a new leaf. She’s looking for Amanita to talk to her and convince her to-”
“WHAT?!” shrieked Artemis, almost deafening Catskill. “She- She can’t- She’ll-” She got to her feet, shoving Gale out of the way, and ran for the door.
But Catskill was already there and blocked her from leaving. They were both earth ponies, but Catskill had lived in tough lands far longer than Artemis and didn’t feel pain anymore. She pushed a flailing Artemis away from the door. “Whoa, hey!” she yelled. “It’s- It’s not that bad!”
“Not that bad? Not that bad?” Artemis giggled wildly as she tried and failed to get around Catskill. “Bitterroot’s jus’ gonna try talkin’ t’Amanita an’ y’say it ain’t that bad? You-”
Behind them, Trace poked her head in around the door. “Heavens, who stepped on the litter of chipmunks?” she asked. “My ears are still ringing.”
“It was Artemis,” grunted Catskill. Artemis caught her on the shoulder, a blow that would’ve made her reflexively release Artemis if her reflexes were still working. “I told her about Bitterroot, and-”
“Wow!” yelled Trace. “Get a load of that tree!” And she was gone.
Catskill rolled her eyes, threw Artemis to the ground, and put a hoof on her chest. Artemis’s random swinging stopped. Gale twitched, but didn’t do anything. “Will you listen to me, please?” Catskill asked calmly. “It makes sense. Trust me.”
“Fine, but this better be good,” snapped Artemis. She wiggled out from Catskill’s pin and planted her rump on the ground.
“Bitterroot thinks Amanita’s not as… cruel as other necromancers,” said Catskill. “So she’s going to Amanita, see if she’s willing to talk, and see what goes from there.”
“Well, ain’t that jus’ dandy,” sneered Artemis. “She’s gonna jus’ fly up, land riiiight nex’ to a necromancer, an’ they’ll be all sweet an’ cuddly an’ talk ’bout their feelin’s. Heh. Gimme a break. Necromancers don’t do crap like that.”
Great. Just a few sentences in and Catskill was already regretting bringing the subject up. But she was nothing if not committed. You couldn’t be a ranger otherwise. “She saved my life! Which, yes, apparently required my becoming a zombie, but I’ve still got my mind! What makes you so sure Amanita hasn’t changed at all?”
“She’s a necromancer!” yelled Artemis. “I don’t know ’ow many times I ’ave to say that, it speaks for itself!”
“And how does being a necromancer determine her personality?” asked Catskill. “Maybe she’s a different necromancer than usual.” She gestured into the distance. “It’s not like ponies are all different from one another or anything.”
“Mebbe, but she lived out ’ere,” said Artemis. “Ain’t like this’s a land that tol’rates softness. Nopony out ’ere’s decent.”
“Thanks for the glowing description,” said Catskill darkly. “I live a few streets over. What did I do to you to make you say that?”
“W-well,” said Artemis, twitching, “almost nopo-”
“Oh, no, you are not moving the goalposts on me!” snapped Catskill. “You said ‘nopony’ with no qualifiers. And suddenly, when you learn that-”
“I made a mistake!” said Artemis. “I-”
“No, you went to extremes while knowing jack squat about what you were talking about! You just threw around-”
“The princesses’re all ’bout ’armony, but y’just don’t get ponies talkin’ like that out ’ere. Nopony cares ’bout gettin’ along.”
“I don’t see why that matters. Just because the princesses are more open about harmony than ponies out here doesn’t mean nopony out here cares about it. I swear, you’re projecting so hard you could display a slideshow on the moon.”
“I ain’t projectin’ nothin’! I jus’-” Artemis cut herself off with a growl and ran a hoof through her mane. “Screw it,” she mumbled to herself. “She’ll know by now. Gotta shore up.” She glared nastily up at Catskill. “Startin’ wi’ you.”
She didn’t know why, but something about the look on Artemis’s face, the energy in her eyes, made Catskill take a step back as her breath hitched. It was like a curtain draped over her aggression had suddenly been stripped away. Something was wrong.
Artemis took a step towards Catskill.
The door to the mill opened. “Arty, the fifteen minutes I asked for are almost up,” said Trace. “I assume you want to get going now? If so…” Her eyes flicked upwards. “I’ll need to retrieve Gale’s arquebus. And I can’t believe I never said this, Gale, but I apologize for that. The situation was-”
“We ain’t goin’ nowhere yet,” mumbled Artemis.
“-a mite tense, so I… took the most immediate… Not going?”
“No.”
“I- I’m sorry, but when did this come around? Less than a quarter of an hour ago, you were acting like not moving right then and there was equivalent to sawing your own legs off!”
Catskill agreed. Nothing she’d said had apparently gotten through to Artemis, yet she still wanted to stay here all of a sudden? Catskill prayed it had nothing to do with Artemis’s sudden change in expression.
Artemis sighed. “Change o’ plans. ’T’s complicated. Gale, get your gun yourself. We got work to do.”
Gale nodded, flared her wings, and fly-jumped up to the rafters. She retrieved her gun easily. By the time she landed on the ground again, she had the harness on and was already making the finishing touches to the belts.
“Hold up,” said Trace, blinking. “What in the blazes- She just- You said her wing was paralyzed!” she exploded, pointing furiously at Gale. “Land’s sakes, do you know how much easier everything would have been if you’d only-”
“Kill ’er,” Artemis said, pointing at Trace. “She annoys me.”
And Gale immediately shot Trace in the chest.
Bitterroot was expecting it, but Amanita didn’t try to run at all as they walked back upriver. She didn’t even complain. Her pace was a bit slow, but Bitterroot brushed that off as the aftereffects of hypothermia. They marched up the rocky banks, not going very fast, but never slowing down. The pain in her leg was slowly getting worse. She wasn’t limping yet, but Bitterroot could only pray the wound wouldn’t get infected before they reached civilization again.
They also didn’t talk much. Bitterroot was content to just put the miles behind them, but Amanita hadn’t said anything, either, apparently wanting to just walk and listen to the rushing river. Bitterroot wasn’t sure if she was the talkative type at all. Maybe not. It wasn’t like there was much to talk about at the moment, so why try to force it?
Of course, there was one question that was relevant. Bitterroot decided it was best to just get it out now, before the silence got too awkward. “So what happened?” she asked.
Amanita twitched a little, missing a rock on a steep slope. “Hmm?” she said unconvincingly as she picked herself up..
“Why’d you leave Circe?” Bitterroot reached the top of the slope and turned around. “What hit you in the face to bring you back to reality?” She offered a hoof; Amanita accepted it and Bitteroot hauled her up.
“W-well, it’s…” Amanita took a deep breath. “Please remember,” she said quietly, “that… I hate what I did. I was… stupid, selfish, and so, so egocentric. What I’m going to tell you, don’t chew me out for. I’m already doing that myself.”
“…Okay,” Bitterroot said. “I’ll keep quiet.” If she could keep quiet next to Artemis for several days, she had to be able to shut up here, right?
“Fine.” Amanita ran a hoof through her mane. “I… Long story short, when I was not much younger, I had a marefriend. Let’s call her Lily. She got sick. Magic only delayed the inevitable. She died. I… wasn’t the best at accepting the consequences. And then Circe found me and took me in. She brought me up north and taught me necromancy, mostly how I could whistle up Lily’s spirit from beyond death any time I wanted. Yes, Circe was doing some… violent, depraved things, but I ignored them. They didn’t matter. Lily mattered. I had her. And I was happy.”
“Uh-huh.” Bitterroot managed to keep it at that.
Amanita looked sideways at Bitterroot, like she was daring her to say something more, but eventually continued, “Then, one day I noticed. Whenever I called her up, Lily always agreed with me, whatever I said. I actually didn’t like that. Lily had been headstrong, forceful. She’d had no problem laughing in my face if I was being stupid. It was part of the reason I’d loved her. But there she was, fawning over me like I was the only thing in the world. I took a closer look at the spells I’d been taught and noticed that there was one bit that… basically replaced her wants with mine. It’s complicated, I’ll spare you the details. The next time I summoned her, I left that bit out. And then I learned what I’d been doing to her.”
Amanita looked away and started blinking a lot. “The second she appeared,” she said quietly, “Lily started screaming at me. She wailed that she hated me, asked what I was doing, raping her mind like that. She tried to leave, but my own spells prevented her. She… basically said I was her jailer and slaver, ripping her from the afterlife for my own ego.”
Bitterroot stumbled. “What?”
“Every time I’d called her up previously,” Amanita said, her ears folded back, “I-I’d been unknowingly stripping her of her free will. She’d been ecstatic to see me was because the spell said she should be. She’d been agreeing with whatever I said because the spell said she should. A-and I’d been t-trapping her in her own mind w-without a care in the world. The only difference between enthralling somepony and what I’d been doing to Lily was that Lily didn’t have her body to live in.” Her voice was full of contempt, probably directed at herself. “I apologized as best I could, promised to never call on her again, and let her go.” She managed to smile. “That’s a promise I’ve managed to keep.”
“But I thought thralls were mindless,” said Bitterroot. She restlessly rustled her wings. “That necromancy was outlawed because of its capability for soldiers, and-”
“No, no, it’s worse than that,” said Amanita. “Using dead bodies to do your bidding is bad enough. But think about it: these bodies…” She waved up and down herself. “They’re animated and given will by souls. So what animates and gives will to dead bodies? Same thing: the souls of those bodies. But a necromancer rips them from whatever existence they have in the afterlife, traps them in a weak, fleshy body, and imposes her own will on them instead of their own. It’s… This kind of necromancy is basically mass mind control.”
“Holy Tartarus,” whispered Bitterroot. Something at the base of her neck squirmed in disgust. If there was any way to make raising an army of zombies even worse… “Does… Did Circe know?”
“Oh, she knows,” Amanita said, laughing bitterly. “She knows. She just doesn’t care. She wants power, and she doesn’t care who she has to violate to get it.”
“Stars above.” The wind howled like it was blowing through a graveyard. Screw Amanita. Circe was the one they needed to find. “Do you know where she is now?”
“With any luck, trapped at the bottom of a mineshaft.”
Bitterroot blinked and tilted her head. “Okaaaaaay…”
Amanita rolled her eyes. “Right after I… ahem, talked with Lily, I went to Circe. I… I still thought she was in the dark about what she was actually doing.”
“How long were you her apprentice?”
Folding her ears back, Amanita mumbled, “Two, three years, I think. I didn’t really keep track. I just-”
“And it didn’t occur to you that maybe she knew exactly what she was do-”
“I don’t know!” yelled Amanita, making Bitterroot jump. “Maybe, yes, I was that stupid. Maybe I was making excuses because I respected her ability to teach me. Maybe-” She groaned and shot a bolt of magic that vaporized a small snowdrift. “In the end, I don’t know why I thought that. It- Look, the ‘why’ isn’t important now, okay? And what happened to ‘I’ll keep quiet’?”
“Shutting up,” said Bitterroot tightly. She’d hardly been chewing Amanita out. It was a simple question. “Continue.”
“So I told Circe about this,” said Amanita, “and she basically said, ‘This is news to you?’ And then she went off on this… Darwhinneyan tangent about the weak serving the strong, and necromancers were obviously the strong, and it was so circular you’d think it’d been drawn with a compass. I hid my shock and managed to smile and nod along with what she said and parrot my thanks to her for making me strong and… Anyway, that was when I finally realized she was a bit, y’know…” She pointed at one of her ears and traced a small circle in the air.
“Was that when you ran?” Bitterroot asked. She wasn’t sure how she’d react to a mentor figure being nuts like that. All her teachers, even the ones she’d hated, had been… sane. At the worst, slightly loopy in an entertaining way that didn’t interfere with their teaching ability.
“Not yet. I… I was scared,” admitted Amanita. “It’s one thing for somepony to threaten to kill you and use your corpse as a puppet, it’s another to have already seen that the pony do that to others. So I waited for a good opportunity. And then Circe said she’d show me how to make a phylactery. I’d need to live long to learn every aspect of necromancy. She was already almost four hundred years old, and she needed to fix her phylactery, so-”
“Fix her phylactery?” asked Bitterroot, her ears going up. “What, with a hammer and nails?”
Amanita started scowling. “You said you’d shut up,” she mumbled.
“It’s- You’re making it sound like she’s some handymare for souls!”
“Uffh. It’s metaphysical,” Amanita said with a sigh. “What do stories about liches always say they do with their phylacteries?”
“Erm…” In all honesty, the only things Bitterroot remembered about any story involving liches were: a), soul jars, and b) liches being a bad thing for everpony around them. But after a bit of thinking, she dredged up some vague memories. “They… store them in… some secret place, right?” Or maybe she was remembering the details from cheesy fantasy schlock.
“Right,” said Amanita. “Because they need to go back and repair them from time to time. Objects like that crystal-” She patted her saddlebags. “-can’t hold souls the way bodies can. They fall apart on a metaphysical level, the soul disperses, ding-dong, the lich is dead. I mean, if phylacteries didn’t require some kind of upkeep, a lich would just stick her soul in a needle in an egg in a duck in a hare in a box beneath a tree on a phantom island or something and nopony, including her, would be able to find it and use it to kill her!”
“Fine, fine,” said Bitterroot, holding up a hoof. “So she wanted to repair her phylactery, right? And get you to make one?”
Amanita nodded. “Yeah. She took us north to a mining town. Grayvale. We took up residence in one of the mine shafts, and…” She shuddered. “Short version, she enthralled half the town within a week and cowed the rest into submission. And one night…” She walked for several moments in silence. The river bubbled over some rocks. “She killed most of them in a ritual to rejuvenate her phylactery. The rest, she killed because she could.”
Bitterroot simply swallowed. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I was supposed to also draw on the energy of the ritual,” said Amanita, “but by then I’d had enough. When she was exulting over her success, I grabbed her phylactery, used magic to collapse the mine supports on top of her, and ran. And…” she shrugged. “That’s it, really.”
“Huh.” It was a lot to take in, even with Amanita only giving the highlights. She might have to delay deciding what to do with Amanita until she had time to sleep on this. But there was still the matter of- “You’re sure Circe’s still trapped in that mineshaft? The last thing we need is a wrathful lich coming at us.”
“Not a hundred percent,” said Amanita, looking away from Bitterroot. “She was still a lich, so she couldn’t die, and… Well, I’ve just been assuming she got out somehow and I just delayed her.”
Bitterroot nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Like, the bear you mentioned that chased you down? That was a ‘just in case’ thing. It was only supposed to go after Circe and it should’ve ignored you.” She frowned. “I don’t know what I did wrong. Wish I could examine it.”
“You only got it half-wrong,” said Bitterroot. It was weird that she could come close to joking about something like zombie bears. “Really, it only chased Artemis.”
“Artemis,” mused Amanita. “Hmm. Was she important in your group?”
“Eh. I guess. Not really.” Bitterroot shrugged. “She’s the one who brought us all together to look for you, but she couldn’t actually lead if her life depended on it. Too angry.”
Amanita stumbled a bit. Bitterroot pretended not to notice. “V-very angry?” she asked, a bit quickly. “Touchy, temperamental, and tiring?”
“Heh. Yeah,” said Bitterroot. “Pretty much. I do-”
“Nihilistic about others, but outraged when you apply it to her?” Amanita had stopped walking and her eyes were wide.
Bitterroot also stopped. She turned around and looked suspiciously at Amanita. “Uh, yeah. How’d you know that?”
“Dark purple coat pale eyes gray mane skinny earth pony?” Amanita asked breathlessly. She was almost running in place, kneading the ground with her hooves.
“What’re you getting a-”
“Answer me!” screamed Amanita. She leaped forward and shook Bitterroot. “Does that describe her or not?!”
“Yes!” yelled Bitterroot. A few flaps took her out of Amanita’s reach. “Yes, it does! What’s your point?”
But once Bitterroot had confirmed that Amanita was talking about Artemis, Amanita stumbled back, gazing into the distance, apparently separated from the world. “Oh, fuck,” she whispered. “No, no, no, no, no… Sun blast it! How did she-”
“Hey! Hey!” Bitterroot slapped Amanita across the face, apparently bringing her back to the real world. “What’s up? Do you know somethi-”
“We need to go,” whispered Amanita. “We need to turn around and run for the Crystal Empire RIGHT NOW!” She immediately turned and bolted downriver.
Bitterroot caught up with her in seconds and wrestled Amanita to the ground. “What-” she grunted, “-is up- with you?”
“S-she’s dangerous,” said Amanita. She couldn’t keep her voice level. “She’s sadistic, violent, and, and she’s not a bounty hunter. If we don’t go-”
“You know her?” Bitterroot flapped her wings once and shut down an attempt by Amanita to escape.
“Know her?” Amanita laughed crazily, shrilly. “I stole her soul! She’s my master! She’s Circe!”
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ooOof
A double feature today? You spoil me.
Yeah, kinda saw that coming, but still, daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.
Yup, figured that was the case. Still a great setup for the twist. Definitely looking forward to seeing what happens next.
I understood that reference.
Trace, not being a coward, will gladly except her death now and we'll never again have to hear a bounty hunter, of all things, pontificating on what others choose to do with their lives or how to extend those lives.
Nice Koschei reference. Hm, I can't find any particular connection between Circe and Artemis, though they're both female figures from Greek myth who were able to turn men into animals.
I'd say the suspense is killing me, but the next chapter button is right there! This is fantastic, and I love the twist. The foreshadowing built up very nicely.
I KNEW IT! Something was off when it was mentioned the beer wasn't supposed to attack them!
wait...
NOOO TRACE! YOU MONSTROUS AUTHOR! SHE WAS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER!
My goodness, what a predictable, unpredictable twist this is. These bounty hunters are very slow-witted.
Tracer and Catskill discussing if Amantia might be a good person doesn’t quite logically follow. Feels like they’re suspiciously ignoring the hard evidence of Polar’s murder and the undead bear attack in their logic. Story still dope tho.
Oh, fuck
By this point we kinda already figured that out
9544843
Me too.. damn, did Disney popularized Kaschey this way, or we just have shared tales?