Griffon The Brush-Off - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai

Griffon The Brush-Off

The first thing Twilight Sparkle did upon regaining consciousness was feel along her skull to make sure that her horn was still attached. The second was to realize that the horrible tinny ringing she was hearing, was in fact not just in her head. Cursing, she hauled herself back onto all-fours and stumbled back out into the hall.

---

As soon as she could see properly again, Gilda looked to the chapel’s windows- still too narrow for a griffon to fit through, and still bordered in stone.

No good.

She grabbed Nemesis’s offering-plate, ripped it free of the statue, and hurled it through the window anyway. If she was lucky and didn’t encounter any guards immediately after leaving, it was possible they’d waste further time searching for her outside.

She still had her map of the manor, pretty much memorized in fact. She just had to hope she knew the place better than the new hires. She stuffed the skull’s carrying-pouch down the front of her dress, charged out the doors, and found herself staring down another quartet of guards at the far end of the hall- probably the relief shift for the ones at the chapel.

Well, so much for hope.

“That’s her! Get her!” shouted the older hen in front, “Whoever bags her gets a hundred-bit bonus, dead or alive!”

Well, so much for talking this out.

Gilda grabbed the halberd the pegasus guard had been carrying and took off, charging directly for the dumbstruck guards. At the last split-second before they collided, she flipped her halberd lengthwise and caught all four of them with the haft. It lacked the mass to do any serious injury -save, perhaps, to the unlucky cockerel on the far left who caught the flat of the blade with his helmet- but it did its job in getting Gilda past them before they could bring their own weapons to bear.

How’s that for stopping power, Rainbow Dash?

She soared over their heads and kept on going, zigzagging down the dim corridor and dodging a few hasty crossbow shots. She briefly resented the fact that she hadn’t thought to relieve any of the chapel guards of their barding before things had gotten hectic, but then decided the feeble protection it would’ve offered wasn’t worth being colored brilliant yellow. She drew her own pilfered crossbow and fired a single bolt back down the hallway, then discarded it- reloading on-the-wing was a difficult maneuver at the best of times, and she didn’t want to risk shooting herself in the paw right now.

“I gotcha’…” Somegriff growled from just behind her, and to Gilda’s surprise one of the guards actually winged his way forward into her view, brandishing a curved Abyssinian sword. She lashed out with her rolling pin as they both slowed down to take a corner, catching him square on the top of the head, but his helmet actually seemed up to the challenge- he cried out in surprise, and bobbed downward for a moment, but kept up his pace.

Shit. Uhh… time for Plan C?

Gilda ducked under the guard’s sword swing and managed to position herself above him and to the right, just as they passed the intersection where she and Rainbow Dash had taken cover. She pushed her wings as hard as she dared for just a moment to gain some distance, then slowed down briefly to grab hold of the big suit of Minotaur armor in the alcove and tip it forward. The guard followed her with single-minded focus and slammed right into it as it fell, disappearing behind her in a noisy tangle of metal and feathers.

She chanced a look back before banking around the next corner. One of the other guards had fallen behind, presumably to extract his friend from the pile of destroyed armor; the other was still hot on her tail and had found the courage to start loading another crossbow bolt.

Gilda grinned and kept on flying. She’d done overnight courier runs all the way from Canterine up to Everhoof Station in howling blizzards before, when the pay was good enough. She could keep this pace up all day.

---

The guards stopped paying attention to Rainbow Dash as soon as sirens started ringing deeper inside the manor. That suited the pegasus just fine.

She scanned the perimeter of the ballroom, watching as guests shifted into denser, defensive little clusters. Easily two thirds now had bodyguards of some variety lurking near them, or had revealed weapons of their own. The unlucky few who had come here unarmed, and all of the waitstaff, had more or less glued themselves to Goldstone’s house troops in fearful little clusters.

She caught sight of Rarity heading her way, looking from one group of guests to the other nervously, and trotted across the carpet to join her. “What’s up?” Rainbow asked, suddenly aware of how not-bladed her wings felt.

“I don’t know, I was hoping you knew…” the tailor replied, then pointed to one of the side entrances. “Is that… Twilight?” Indeed, the skinny unicorn was making her way towards them, staggering slightly and breathing heavily, her mane and dress in disarray. The left side of her head was swollen and bruised from her eyebrow up to her horn, and blood trickled from the end of her muzzle.

“Dash! Rarity!” She shouted, and then paused briefly to catch her breath. “I just… I just woke up… -huh- Gilda ruttin’ cold-cocked me on the way back to our -huh- rooms… dunno where -huh- she went…”

Across the room, Gordon and his guards had fallen into a practiced-looking tight diamond formation. Far off, there was a muffled crash of what sounded like metal on metal, followed by the snapping of bowstrings.

Rarity took a deep breath and rubbed the spot below her own horn with one hoof. “I think I have a pretty good idea of where Gilda went, darling.”

“Hmm. Crossbowfire. I’ve changed my stance on that being a happy thing.” Rainbow watched Gordon look around nervously, and then shrug and turn to each of the guards in turn. “Kill anything that gets within… oh, I dunno, how about five meters?”

They all nodded as a unit, and some of the nearby waitstaff immediately scampered off to a safer distance.

Whatever was happening in the corridors outside, it sounded like it was getting closer.

Lord Goldstone strode into the center of the room and muttered something in Griffish to his nearby troops. The rank-and-file guards spread out to the walls, crossbows and short blades at the ready. The fat hen in full plate- Grunt, Rainbow believed her name was- left Goldstone’s side and stepped up to the main double doors, unslinging a gilded steel warhammer and readying it to swing. Rainbow hadn’t seen the cloaked griffon mage leave, but she was very much no longer present.

For a few seconds, nothing at all happened. The pegasus sucked in a few deep breaths and shuffled her wings, dropping into a lower stance ready to leap forward. Twilight and Rarity both crouched behind her, looking nervously from one group of guards to the next. The fat guard captain touched the side of her helmet, barked a few sentences of Griffish, and tightened her grip.

Then Gilda slammed through the doors, and the captain’s warhammer caught her hard just behind her right shoulder. Gilda cried out, and Rainbow as fairly certain she’d heard wingbones snap.

“Oh, no you don’t!” The pegasus kicked off and rushed them both in a single wing-assisted leap, twisting around midair to slam both of her hindlegs into the guard captain’s side. The sensation was akin to kicking a beanbag chair, stuffed inside an oil barrel. Rainbow could tell she hadn’t done the hen any actual damage, but she’d succeeded in her goal of upsetting her next hammer swing enough to narrowly miss Gilda’s sprawled form. The captain cursed in Griffish and twisted around to face Rainbow, leaving her hammer embedded in the floorboards. Sparing a quick look back over her shoulder, Rainbow watched Lord Goldstone reach into his jacket and hurl a long, thin, and extremely sharp dagger at her with surprising dexterity. Rarity’s horn flashed pale blue for just a moment as her eyes narrowed, and the dagger’s trajectory pitched upward ever-so-slightly. It slammed into the wood doorframe just above Dash’s head and detonated in a brilliant blue globe of magical lightning. A few energy bolts colored Twilight-purple followed it, although their trajectories were so wild that Rainbow was unsure what the unicorn had been aiming at- Gilda, or the guard captain.

She dodged a meaty talon swung at her head, darted in close, and delivered a few more quick jabs to the captain’s armored chest. It was rapidly becoming obvious, though, that without her wingblades or weighted sabatons the pegasus was simply in no condition to do serious damage. The captain’s next swing caught her a glancing blow to the side of her muzzle- it was enough to send her reeling for just a moment, but that was all the hen needed to charge forward and slam bodily into her.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Shoot them!” She heard Goldstone shout, as she struggled to roll the much larger griffon off of her.

There was another coordinated snapping of bowstrings, and a single bolt zipped right over Rainbow's head, between her and Grunt; a half dozen metallic pings told her where the others had struck.

“Os ydych chi'n [dent] arfwisg hynny, mae'n dod allan [out of your pay]!” The hen shouted in half-comprehensible Griffish. Rainbow took advantage of the momentary distraction to lever herself forward and up on her wings, then drove a rear hoof directly into the guard’s groin. Searing pain shot back up her leg all the way to the knee, but the guard was no better off. She made a sort of strangled guh noise and slid to the side just enough for the pegasus to wriggle free.

By then, Gilda was already gone.

---

Gilda’s broken right wing throbbed with each pawstep as she ran, dodging the occasional crossbow bolt, but she didn’t dare slow down. Effectively flightless, her priorities had now shifted from presenting the skull to Gordon and rubbing Twilight’s fuzzy purple snout in the whole affair, to getting out of the manor without any additional injuries.

Rainbow Dash could probably handle herself, and it wasn’t like Gilda could double back and check on her.

She skidded around another corner, wincing as the acceleration pulled at her wing, just as a salvo of bright purple magical bolts splattered the wall behind her.

So fuckin’ much for the altruism of ponies…

Another figure stepped out into the middle of the four-way intersection dead ahead, and Gilda cursed as she recognized Goldstone’s robed mage-for-hire. Slowing down risked disaster, though, and so she kept on running.

She’d made it halfway down the corridor when a pair of brilliant, acid-green beams shot out from the shadowy interior of the mage’s hood- which was odd, since griffons typically cast from the talons or wings. At the last possible moment Gilda ducked, and both beams struck a painting well past her head- instantly the canvas sagged with mold and mildew, rotting in its frame. She dodged and weaved, her zig-zagging course costing her precious distance, as more beams struck around her and filled the already stale air with the odor of decay. Carpet shriveled, floorboards warped… and the entire time, the mage didn’t move an inch, even as Gilda drew dangerously near.

Finally, with nowhere else to go, Gilda slammed into the mage with a running tackle, left-side-first… and yelped in surprise as she felt nothing but hard, smooth bone underneath her robes. There was a moment of odd, stretchy resistance and a soft fizzling noise, before the mage’s body came apart with the force of the impact; Gilda stared, wide-eyed, as a polished white griffon skull fell out of the rapidly-collapsing hood, followed by a talonful of vertebrae and a collarbone. She skidded to the floor, unable to support herself against what had become nothing but a pile of loose bones, watching in alarm as a crossbow quarrel shot over her head. Then she felt the distinctive tearing pain of a glancing hit against her right hind leg as she hauled herself back up. After that, there was a loud yowl and several impacts behind her, and the crossbow fire ceased.

Gilda charged off again as best she could, and did not look back.

---

Twilight ran until she thought her barrel would implode, struggling to keep in sight of Gilda, and when that failed struggling equally unsuccessfully to keep in sight of Rainbow Dash. Teleportation would’ve made her task much easier, but even attempting the necessary geometric visualizations right now made her head swim; for the time being she was limited to basic stun bolts, and possibly an amniomorphic shield if absolutely necessary. She skidded around a corner leading to a four-way intersection, just in time to witness Rainbow Dash drop one of Goldstone’s guards with a series of precise strikes to the head and neck. Patches of the hallway looked as though they’d been left exposed to the elements for several months, and near the intersection a frayed blue robe was draped over what appeared to be a pile of disarticulated bones. There was no sign whatsoever of Gilda.

The pegasus turned to look at Twilight. “Shit! Which way?

Currently lacking the breath to speak, the unicorn settled for a shrug, and trotted over to what seemed very much to be the remains of Goldstone’s hired University mage. The bones themselves appeared unremarkable, but Twilight’s attention was drawn immediately to the pair of rune-inscribed copper bands that looked to have replaced the skull’s original sclerotic rings- eyebones found in many birds, griffons included. The only inscriptions she could conclusively identify looked to relate to long-range visual and clairaudio spells; the others were clearly necromantic in nature, which unfortunately put them just outside Twilight’s usual areas of expertise. She’d very much have liked to bring them back to Equestria for study, but given how they were currently disintegrating into a noxious greenish puddle and melting their way through the floorboards, picking them up was likely unwise.

Although ESS would still probably be very grateful to learn that the University of Innsbeak is even working on something like this… Yeah, grateful enough to put me in a cell with a window. Oh well.

Rainbow Dash trotted over. “Hey, did that wizard just… I mean, was she always a skeleton, or…?”

“I don’t think the wizard ever left the University,” Twilight explained, as soon as she had the breath to speak again, “Gilda just destroyed the mindless drone that attended meetings on her behalf.”

“Wait. Gilda just killed somegriff’s Spike?”

“Ha. Ha.” Twilight finally located a thin trickle of bright-red blood trailing down the right-side corridor’s carpet. “C’mon, this way!”

---

Gilda swerved down another yellow-carpeted hallway, guided as much by the sound of guards hot on her heels as she was the map in her head. She’d started out with a sizable lead; but in between her wing and her leg, she was slowing down and they were starting to gain ground. She dug her claws into the carpet to slow herself just enough, ignoring the fresh jabs of pain that shot through both her leg and her wing, and ducked down a narrower side passage. This one. Third door on the left. Behind her, the sound of impacts and crossbow fire once again mixed with the sizzling of magical energy, but she didn’t dare look back now. One door down.

Another crossbow quarrel zipped overhead. Two doors.

Halfway to the next, Gilda found herself wrapped in a wobbly, flickering globe of pinkish energy- a good thing, too, as it immediately absorbed two more crossbow shots and what looked like some sort of lightning bolt, although at visible cost to its own solidity. She didn’t even bother to slow down, and charged headfirst into its far side. Somepony whinnied behind her, distinctly equine and distinctly pained, and the barrier snapped out of existence. Here.

She grit her teeth as she skidded to a halt, and wrenched the door open, splinters of wood she’d torn free from the frame ricocheting off her chest. More magical bolts slammed into the door as she dashed inside, heading right for the big picture windows in the far wall.

Gilda grabbed a spindly Zebrican-style wooden end table and hurled it through the glass ahead of her, even as hooves scrabbled against the carpet just outside.

Then she jumped, stretching out her one good wing to try to turn her half-story fall into some sort of controlled spiral.

The hedgerow down below looked reasonably soft, and she was just about on a good trajectory to intercept it, when a purple glow filled her peripheral vision and a stun bolt hit her square in the back of the neck.

There wasn’t really a sensation of impact; just a burning, tingling numbness that spread out from where she’d been struck, washed over her whole body in the span of less than a second, and left her muscles limp and unresponsive in its wake. As her partially controlled spiral opened out again into an uncontrolled drop and the hedgerow rushed up at her far too fast, Gilda wondered if the numbing properties of the spell would also prevent her from feeling the collision.

It did not.

She landed hard, mostly on her belly, scattering leaves and twigs in a brief plume.

Now everything hurt in roughly equal measure, but as near as she could determine nothing new seemed to be broken- although that awful tingling heat was still omnipresent, and when she tried to raise her head from the awkward slumped-over position she’d found herself in, her muscles still refused to respond. Then again, she wasn’t sure she’d be in any condition to support her own weight right now without the spell.

After a few seconds there was another flash of magenta light and Twilight Sparkle materialized next to her. The unicorn stumbled around as if she were about to pass out again. “I dun need t' come down to breakf'st, Mom, I got a doctor’s dirge now…” she mumbled, then bowed her head and dry-heaved a few times, and finally seemed to regain some of her composure. “Ugh… oh, Harmony, that was a bad idea… right.” Twilight looked up, and Gilda watched Rainbow Dash gliding down to land next to her.

Rainbow immediately trotted over to the ruined hedgerow, reached out a hoof towards Gilda, and then cautiously pulled it back. “Aww, shit… shit… Gil’s not… I mean, she’s not seriously hurt or…”

“I don’t think so, just stunned,” Twilight replied, although Gilda had no idea how the unicorn could possibly know that.

She tried to say so, but her beak wasn’t being particularly responsive at the moment and all she managed were a few inarticulate caws.

“Don’t… uhhh, don’t try to talk,” Rainbow admonished, ears dropping down in concern.

“Please!” Twilight rolled her eyes.

“You’re gonna be okay…” Dash looked at Twilight and cocked her head. “… right?” Then she turned back to face the manor, and her eyes went wide. “Awww, shit.”

With a rustle of feathers and faint rattle of armor, Lord Goldstone alighted on the path some ways away from them, accompanied by his hammer-wielding captain and easily a half-dozen other rank-and file guards. Rainbow Dash and the captain swiveled to face each other, both glaring daggers, as the other guards spread out and formed a loose circle around them.

After a few seconds of tense, aggressive silence, Gilda finally managed to get her beak and tongue more-or-less cooperating again. “Caaawww… cwaaahhh… cnhh.. caaaan shomecreashure gimme outta thish fawkin bush?!”

Rainbow turned away from the fat hen, and very carefully began sliding Gilda out of her saddle of crushed branches. It was a delicate, extremely painful process, but Gilda soon found she’d recovered enough strength in her forelegs to help drag herself forward- although, sadly, not enough to actually stand, as she landed on her haunches with another beak-jarring thud.

“… sorry?” Rainbow Dash muttered.

Lord Goldstone, in the meantime, had made his way over to where his ancestor’s skull had slipped out of its carrying-sack and rolled to a stop in the gravel courtyard. He poked at it with one talon, and then turned back to Gilda and the ponies. “I’d half-expected this sort of behavior from your hirelings…” he clasped one talon over his chest- and his replacement amulet- and lurched back as if struck, “… but not from you, Doctor Sparkle.” He looked back up at the manor and shook his head. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find reliable guards in this miserable city?”

“Four Windsh, I wonder why that might be…” Gilda muttered to herself.

The tiercel rounded on her and cuffed her across the beak. It hurt, but not a lot, at least not compared to everything else. “Ordinarily, I’d just take all of this out of the mainlander’s hide, but it’s clear to me now that her hide isn’t worth terribly much, so-”

“Hardly,” Twilight spoke up, “You do realize I fired her yesterday, right?”

“Twiiiilight!” Rainbow Dash chided, to no apparent effect, positioning herself between Gilda and Goldstone with her wings outstretched.

Goldstone ignored her utterly and rounded on the unicorn, tail swishing back and forth. “Oh, so I’m to believe this gutter trash is just some rogue element? With her trick ballgown and softpaw boots?” He ran a talon through his nigh-nonexistent crest, big watery eyes narrowing suspiciously. “No… I can tell when somepony’s trying to pull the wool over my eyes… I wouldn’t still be here, otherwise. You were in on this hackneyed scheme, Doctor Sparkle, and no amount of retroactive ass-covering is going to protect you now.” He leaned forward, the flexible sides of his beak pressed together in a thin line. “As of tonight, you are no longer welcome in my city. It’s going to be a long walk down to the train station, and assuming you make it there in one piece, I’m sure some of my friends in the Equestrian government would love to make public just what an esteemed scholar of your caliber has been doing over here. As for your friends, I’ll probably need to-”

He was cut off by a soft popping noise, and the sudden appearance of a bright orange globe of light on the lawn, fading to green around the edges. When it disappeared, Gordon of Innsbeak stood in its place, walking-stick clutched in one talon and a solitary blue-uniformed guard beside him.

Gilda was surprised by how normal the old cockerel looked. She hadn’t paid much attention to him during the party, but her brief childhood stay in Innsbeak had elevated him to near-legendary status. She still remembered the local street-cubs daring each other to sneak onto the University grounds and knock on the door to his tower- supposedly he employed a crossbow-wielding butler who shot all visitors on sight.

Almost immediately, Goldstone’s troops backed away. They outnumbered Gordon and his escort by a factor of three, but somehow Gilda doubted that was anywhere near enough.

Gordon stepped away from his guard -Gilda wondered if he needed any at all, and didn’t just keep them around for looks- and surveyed the assembled creatures with a rapidly-shifting, unsteady gaze. Then he laughed, briefly, and said in perfectly unaccented Ponish “First thing’s first, I’m seeing a griffon skull lying out here, so I’m going to assume one of you laid it out for me.”

Lord Goldstone and Twilight both stared, silent and open-mouthed. Finally, the tiercel cocked his head. “… Excuse me?”

Gordon seemed not to notice as he picked his way over to Geraldine III’s skull. He moved surprisingly adroitly for such an old creature. “Thanks, that’s very forward-thinking of you!” He plucked it off the ground with the end of his walking stick, shook off some of the dirt it had acquired, and casually lobbed it undertalon to the guard.

Then he twisted his head back and forth, unsteady gaze wandering over the garden. “You know, it would make this whole day almost worth it if I found buried treasure here. I mean, this is the place for it to be…” For just a moment he focused back on Goldstone, who was currently all but vibrating with restrained anger, “Either that, or some bodies.”

“Now, you listen here,” the tiercel snapped, “The University might be used to letting you run roughshod, but if you insist on toying with my property, you’ll find that-”

“Ah, somegriff thinks he’s smarter than me,” Gordon cut him off. “I don’t have to dignify this.” The mage made a quick, odd little gesture with one talon. “I don’t need to hear your opinion; I already know what it is.”

Goldstone’s beak opened and closed a few more times, soundlessly, and only when Gilda saw his eyes widen in horror did she realize he was attempting to continue to speak- utterly without success.

“I hate awkward pauses like this,” Gordon continued, his gaze still tracking at random over the ponies, the guards, the garden, and the walls of the manor in front of him. “Of course, I’m the one who has to break the ice…”

Gilda wondered if she might be able to say something to the mage in her own defense, but then decided that silence was almost certainly the safest option.

Gordon turned back to Goldstone, who had finally given up attempting to speak and was simply glaring at his own guards. “Okay, here’s how I think this is gonna end. I’ll buy this skull for the original price, what was it, ten thousand bits?” He reached up and poked at Goldstone’s narrow chest with his walking-stick. “In exchange, I won’t cut you out of the University’s profits, even though you pretty much directly caused a major security incident, invited agents from the Equestrian government into the city, and got Gina’s stupid skeleton destroyed. Okay?”

Goldstone nodded, although judging by his expression he was far from happy- furious, more likely.

“Diplomacy breaks out!” Gordon cackled, before swiveling back to face Twilight. Gilda was fairly certain she saw the unicorn flinch backwards a little.

“Now, as for you…” He grinned, and clapped a withered talon on her shoulder. “You got my attention, which is normally something the so-called sane ponies try to avoid. Tartarus, you made me laugh. So I’ll say this nicely.” He looked Twilight square in the eye, even if just for a moment and with his head tilted at a strange angle. “Take your three stooges and fuck off back to Canterlot.”

To Gilda’s surprise, Twilight swallowed hard and looked right back. “Actually, Doctor, I’m not from Canterlot. Or, well, I guess I am in the sense that I was born there, but I’m not working for Strategic Services or whatever if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, I came out here to try and learn some information Canterlot doesn’t want me to find. And I’m really sorry about starting a bidding war over your skull."

For just a moment, her statement actually seemed to give the old griffon pause. “That’s a new one,” he muttered, “and having this whole disaster be an elaborate ruse just to get me to let my guard down- which you didn’t manage, by the way- is a little beyond what some armchair general or stuffed-shirt ESS director could reasonably execute. There was too little friendly fire back there, too.”

Twilight cocked her head, clearly perplexed. “I…guess?”

Then, Gilda’s heart nearly leapt into her throat as the mad mage picked his way over to look down directly at her. She could all but hear magical energy buzzing as he approached, and realized that while she’d been watching him negotiate with Goldstone and Twilight the uncomfortable numbing sensation of the stun spell had dissipated. With much protestation from her various fractures, cuts, and puncture wounds, she hauled herself back onto all-fours.

Gilda then found herself pinned in Gordon’s gaze like a deer in lantern light, and realized that there was something underneath his seemingly manic, unfocused behavior- a clear, brilliant, calculating kind of madness. His scatterbrained appearance was nothing but a front before it. The idea of ever crossing Gordon of Innsbeak had never seemed particularly wise to Gilda, but now it positively terrified her. She wondered if Twilight had noticed that, too.

“As for you… They say you have to play the cards you’ve been dealt in life. I don’t think so. I think if you’ve been dealt a stacked deck, you can knock the table over, pull out a knife, and start swinging at… life, I guess… I don’t know…” he trailed off, and then shrugged. “The point is, you’re free to go. Consider that your payment for delivering my skull. And for getting rid of Gina’s paranoid crutch. I’d been meaning to do that for years, but wasn’t sure I could get away with it…”

He stepped back towards the patch of lawn where he’d arrived, and waved at his guard, who’d been standing there casually over the entire course of the conversation. The guard fished a small blue-cloth sack out of his armor, which produced the distinct sound of rattling coinage as he chucked it at Goldstone’s feet. The tiercel picked it up, peered inside, and then took off without another word, heading back to the manor. One by one, his guards followed, and once they were all gone the blue-uniformed University guard took flight as well.

Then Gordon waved his walking-stick at Twilight in a vague 'come here' gesture. The unicorn looked back at Rainbow Dash, who nodded. She and the mad mage set off down one of the paths, around a corner, and out of sight.

Rainbow turned back to Gilda, her ears pivoting from side to side. “Uhhh… do you… are you okay? I mean, have you got someplace to stay, or…”

Gilda shrugged, and began limping her way down the forecourt to the big iron gates at the edge of the property. They were closed, but didn’t seem to be locked, at least not from the inside. “I’ll be fine. I gotta chariot waiting for me ‘bout a block from here, to get me back to the inn. Figured I might need a quicker getaway, and didn’t wanna risk flying through the lower city solo.”

“That’s… good… I guess?” Rainbow Dash looked back at the front door of the mansion, where Rarity was visible standing in the foyer, looking very confused indeed.

“Not really,” Gilda laughed, then winced as doing so as the motion tweaked her injured wing, “Fucker’s been costin’ me a bit every two minutes this whole night just to sit there…”

Author's Note:

I also swear that someday, I will write an EC story that doesn’t end with some giant action sequence.

This, however, is also not that story.

Comments

[Carnifaxy]

Well, Gilda sorta made it out all right. Recovery is going to take a while (and money).

[Comickook]

Excellent work on the exchanges, characterizations, action and future chapter set-up in all the right places. VERY certainly appreciated the fight between Gilda and Goldstone's troops (some of it with Rainbow's help), as well as the dialogue between Goldstone, Gordon and Twilight. Now Gordon has that skull back and Gilda has a place to stay at least. And Twi and her friends have a better idea of the sort of conditions Griffons live under, so they might make some efforts to try to gradually improve that diplomatically (though that's going to take several years at minimum).

Certainly looking forward to the epilogue as well as future stories in this series.

[Cerulean Blue]

Action sequences are a great way to move the plot along though :)