Consolation Sent Down

by Comma Typer

Likeness

The seat of her soul has disappeared. Wrath powers through Rosa Maledicta, with only herself to blame. She curses herself for being so lax, having believed that life cannot yet surprise her and that her lowliest guards patrolling the vault of her phylactery are somehow invincible.

The news launches her out of her seat in Magehold's highest tower. She splattered one of the ghoulish newsbearers against the walls, bones stuck by her magic. An ugly mess. Like her. She does not deny that she is another ugly creature. Her parents named her after her scarlet mane, wilted yet beautiful like a rose. Bad mane days pale against her appearance now: gaunt flesh stretched across her skull, with an incomplete coat that uncovers bubbling muscles and ligaments. She smells of eggs and sewers. A tiara of thorns graces her head.

After a dizzying spiral of stairs, she touches down on the ground floor. A chariot awaits her, helmed by loyal skeletal servants whose loyalty rewarded them with their fleshly hides. (Said loyalty is of the brainwashing kind, tainted by her resurrection magic to obey.) "Variegate," Rosa says to the mare leading the chariot charge, who also happens to be the other bearer of bad news, "can you tell me anything about him?"

Variegate snaps to attention, green eyes affixed to Rosa's gaze. Variegate's is a most familiar face, paraded around like a trophy, the earliest corpse Rosa still bothers to keep around. "They've told me that he is Archon Eros, Your Majesty. They've confirmed him to be the last one."

Astonishment leads Rosa to blink in place. "The last one."

"The last of the living, yes, Your Majesty."

---

The chariots pull over by a run-down house, wooden splinters flayed across the front of the door, dipped in blood.

That drags her out of her reverie. The last one, the last one... with a soul that yet lives, that has not yet tasted death. A box traveled with her vehicle, suffused with maces and daggers and potions to protect against this survivor.

He is a brittle spirit, older than a century. Without respect, he kneels, has been kneeling in pain, watched over by slack-jawed or no-jawed ghouls. A skeleton archer, by his teeth, puts down his bow. An arrow pierced through the archon's leg.

His squirming figure thrills her, supplanting the rage over her stolen phylactery for the time being. The ground is cold mush to her hooves. "The last... of your kind. Of the forces of light and life. Your faithfulness to Boreas... what has that done for you?"

The devouring swarm that marched south to reclaim the land of the living for blissful extinction: it's what she could do. A wilted rose graces what remains of her flanks: A blasphemous talent for Equestria. It's worthy of exile across the sea, to Magehold where darkness reserved a spot for her. (Be free to unleash your potential. Her potential demanded the manipulation of life's fabric, the "sacred" parameters that set the stage of the soul.) It was good.

It did a hacking, coughing Eros no good, with his dirty priestly clothes scarred, torn to chunks.

A claw inches for a pocket. It halts.

Her magic fries the claw useless. A series of elderly, neck-bending coughs later, Rosa pats her horn, warm from the spell. Fixated on him, she orders her slaves to stand down. The last... plenty of blades and bullets had cut off many an enemy's last words. No heroic last stands for the brave priest-soldiers of the Order, nor the hardy Imperial knights at Griffenheim. Not even the united front of ponies, zebras, hippogriffs, kirin—an entire world set against her—for the martyrs might've made legends.

All the lovely, brilliant, explosive years of her prime, passed away. The wind howls, whips at her graying mane and his tattered cloths, background to the ring of ghouls at her command, lending their target no escape.

A glass tube fell. She can also smell burned bread.

"What..." Eros gulps, seeming to grasp for any footing, any opening, to speak more. "What... do you... plan to do, Rosa? After killing...?"

"You're a special specimen," she begins. "I've been waiting to see who'd come out on top in the end. You? Not a fight... not a fight at all. Just a pathetic griff who should've expired decades ago, leader over a church that no longer exists." Her sneer crackles with the fire of fury: it has to be rubbed in the chicken's face. Posters and radio messages proclaimed the northward march of divinity and holiness: regent of an emperor born and raised to rule, regent of Boreas' chosen, his right-claw creature to fulfill evil's extermination. "Your church's devil won. You called me a child of Maar, so Maar reigns. You're the archon of a dead god."

Lack of restraint demands that his head be smashed in. All four hooves can participate in savoring in the gory mauling. Each piece and limb will be accounted for, to give birth to an abomination in a Boreas-given temple that is a bunch of organs' mass on its last legs. Pain to the fullest measure is to be dished out, poured out, and deserved: conflict and strife, ended under her hoof, the over-abundant sewage of life fighting against life, having arrayed itself against her vision... he, too, must die, deliciously so.

Another thing, she lacks, and that lack weighs itself more to her.

She grabs Eros by the throat, raising him up to stand on thin air and her mercy. "Where is my phylactery?! You know, you know!"

Those fading eyes widen, the sign of—yes, he knows. His beak mumbles wordlessly, then snaps shut. Confirmation of where it is. By her whispered order, her ring of skin-and-bones goons close in. He is a shaking pile of anticipation.

"Tell me where I can find it, old bird! If not, I can kill you now, reanimate you, have these ghouls torture you for as long as we search! I'll stay alive just for you, wither away and still be here! You will feel every sensation, every single burn, and if I'm doomed to live forever because you broke it or sealed it away, you are condemned in my name, and you will die forever! Where is it?!"

She lets go to have Eros crash and burn. The crunch of bones is a symphony, his wheezing as drums to her harmony. The allegedly omnipotent regent of the Empire, cast down from his personal heaven. A symbol of life or life personified: hate, hate.

She lets him crawl, dislocated hindlegs aside.

He has the audacity to look up at her. "Tell me... why you want the phylactery..." More of that smug audacity behind a worn down face and a bloody beak. He probably knows. He definitely knows.

"Why should I trust you? You tried to kill me with your holy water!"

A silent yes is mouthed. A dry throat lets escape a hoary sound. "But I stopped... I am... oh, how shall Boreas judge me, I do not know! You were…"

Pathetic old bird. I'll make you cry. I will strip you naked of those robes, tar you, skin you... you will boil, your blood will bubble, and you will melt, and I will revive you, reanimate you, until the only thing I can see of you is your screaming brain—

Variegate wobbles, now slightly out of place. Rosa affixes her with a damning glare; the ghoul obeys and returns to her position in the ring.

The last one.

Rosa crouches to his level, his head lying on the floor, crowned by necro-fertilized dirt. "I can't die if my soul always has a way back." The last few words are spit on him; she makes sure to land it in his eyes. He winces: a small victory. "Life must die, but I am still alive. Life... festers. It rots. It is a cancer. It fights, it robs. It robbed me: exiled for my 'dark arts.' It robbed you: Boreas poisoned you to fight like pigeons. It robbed all of us. And the windigoes that talked to me of the hate they wanted to spring on the whole world, to feed on them through me... hate only grows when there's someone else to hate. Like you and me. You hate me. I just know it."

"Why..." Another cough shoots up a geyser of blood; a vampire would have reveled in the display. "Why kill yourself?"

"I said it: As long as I am alive, I can hate. I already hate you. The windigoes may be dead, but if I stay long enough, who knows? I… I cannot take the chance..." But you're the last of a dying breed. Squirm, you worm.

"Do you... like death?" comes the question, intermittent between coughs, groans, signals of the struggles to stay awake.

Slipping restraint stops a quick yes from coming out. Clichés notwithstanding (the great equalizer, everyone goes six hooves under, king and pawn return to the same box), death is to rest in peace. No more conflict; every tear will be wiped away. No persecutor shall arise to take her place, to set the earth aflame anew: the windigoes, her rivals within the league, so-called friends—

Shrills of horror bust from behind flowers. It is years ago, and those years will be kind to her. They will bless her with a trans-oceanic voyage to salvation. She's been by Rosa's side, yakking a lot about the beauty of flowers and each individual petal. Daring Do novels inspired her to trek into the jungles, discover new specimens, trade with the local bat ponies. A ritual for a dead bat, speaking to the moon, he lives—Variegate screams like all the others, wanting to sell out to the world after years of loyalty. Rosa gets the escapee first.

Silence proceeds from outside of her ring of ghouls, carried only by dead air. It is freezing. She levitates an arrow from one of the archers to cradle it in her magic.

The holy water seeped into the ground long ago. Eros does not grovel. Treacherous life hides behind the facade that bleeds through his beak and scars.

She stabs him with another arrow. He sinks deeper into the ground. Dirt and mud mix with the metal to blind him, to suffocate. He chokes on his own gurgling blood. Feathers are ripped out; his fleshy coughs intensify.

Eros gasps for air when she pauses, his eyes reduced to squinting slits, a pigeon muddied like a pig, the antithesis of all that is holy.

"Do you like death, archon?"

Blood spills through his beak, the arrow across his leg dripping yet more. He welcomes her into his certainly blurry, blackening vision. "No, Rosa... not when it is... everywhere... but you... I w-wish..." His one good leg collapses on a stray stone. A yelping archon sinks further. "Boreas would've led me... to help you... you innocent pony..."

She shoves dirt into his beak. "I am not to be pitied! You take me for a foal?!" Rosa yanks the arrow out to hear his throat scratched and stretched to the limit. The noise he makes cannot be recognized. She slathers the arrow's captured griffon meat onto herself to fortify her skin, to crudely convey to Eros a revulsion only a self-proclaimed "holy griff" cannot resist.

Eros spasms. Blood loss, failure of some organs, stench of an organism shutting down. Red-stained claws search within his desiccated robes, strands of divinity's blessing reduced to fleeting fabrics. He holds up bread, lifts them up mere inches from the ground. "Forgive me... not, if... that's your... wish, but... may I offer... last rites? Before you... go... depart... with your... phylactery..."

The strained request is repeated two or three more times. The phylactery's directions are repeated the same, if stronger, forced out of his heart. Rosa's ears prick up at the latter.

He becomes entertainment, a morbid circus. Back in Equestria, a younger Rosa saw how a few colts and fillies passed the time: watching ants move, in their lines, to and from an anthill, scouring the grand landscape of a local backyard for giant crumbs. A science lesson then taught her decomposition; ants, too, fed on the dead. A rabbit had been mauled in a nearby forest. The ants had a line. She watched the meticulous deed, the careful deconstruction of a body sent to the little feeders. Her classmates cringed at the pastime.

Organ failure, shutting down—every breath he takes defies the surrounding chill him. The ghouls crack their bones every step they take, at the whim of Rosa's amusement. Watertowns, coordinates... his side of a bargain he didn't ask for, held up partly.

Curiosity sets in when his beak trembles. Fainter than a whisper, under closed eyes, gushes forth a wordy stream, parts of it unintelligible. Other parts, she discerns, context given to her when she sees that beak pointed at her, gesturing to her: salvi—spe—vitae—caritas—Rosa. Intercession for the damned and righteously sui-/omnicidal.

A holy prayer, hideous and limp it is all the same.

In her graying magic, an arrow is raised over his head.