Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 16 — Orpheus

Chapter 16: Orpheus

“I’ll be back as soon as I’ve returned him to the Gates of Tartarus.”

Nopony.

Though look over the shores of the lake I did, I never saw Cards or Dust on a boat, safe from harm. But looking into my reflection in the water, I looked like a Mann again, all the blood washed off with a towel that I had to then burn. At least I finally had my shadow back. If I ever met Princess Celestia, alleged goddess of the sun, I needed to spank her for making the sun so damn hot today.

Of course, the mental image in my head was of me bending Cards-with-a-fancy-hat over my knee, but details, details. In fact, I thought as I trotted along the lake and looked for the girls, Cards probably has some creepy fetish for being spanked. Just because physical pain was the only thing that could make her feel anymore.

I stopped by the cwtch and looked down the street. Where bodies had once lain, strewn around like drunken kitties around a cathouse, there was only a clean, if oddly reddish, street. Each corpse viewable from the lake had been... swept aside. Last thing I needed now was Cards and Dust finding out just what in the nine Hells I had done.

Above the door to the cwtch were the words “Vous Vois”, meaning “I see you”. Odd, since I’d seen this twice before: upon the gates to the Baron’s plantation manor, and above the door to the Cabinet of Curiosities. With a vague curiosity not unlike a monkey high on Kokain who’s just been dropped into the big city, I pushed at the door to the cwtch. Almost predictably, the next moment I was sprawled out on the floor with a lump on my head, and a panicking mare above me.

“Déjà vu,” I groused, ambling back to my hooves. Glaring at the armored Cards as she slowly put her baton away, I muttered, “One of these days, I’m going to walk through a door you’re behind, and nopony is going to bash me over the skull.” Glancing over, I spied a dusty oil lamp and lit it with a match.

“GB, are you okay?” Lightning Dust asked, biting the tip of her wing.

“Dandy,” I replied, looking over the large, sturdy rowboat in the little boathouse, and the closed door leading out onto the lake. “Why didn’t you ship off on the boat onto the lake? You must have been just sitting here for, like, an hour.” Neither of them answered or even looked me in the eye, Dust, in fact, just sort of rocked on her hooves.

“Great,” I groaned, rubbing the face. I considered berating them, but after killing a whole town, mares and children too, I wasn’t in any position to berate. “Look, would you two just get in the boat? I managed to lose the whole town minus Cards’ father—he wasn’t there—” and is probably still alive “—and now we just need to get into the swamp before they realize where I am.”

I checked the sizable rowboat—perhaps the sturdiest-looking one I’d ever seen—and opened up the boathouse door. With everything in place, I helped the mares onto the boat before getting in myself. Cards needed it, her and her shortness. As a last thought, I extinguished the lamplight and took it with us on the boat. It never occurred to me to ask the mares if they wanted to row; I just figured I’d do it. I could get away faster from the town that way, in any case.

Minutes later and were were rowing across the lake at what I hoped was a good pace. Boating, much like baby-punching, was never something I ever put much effort into learning prior. But it was something I’d been forced to do at one point or another, so I at least knew the proper technique and how to do it, also like baby-punching. In my defense, dragon babies lust for pony flesh. But at least dragon babies weren’t little fillies.

With the hateful glare of the sun above, I was glad I had my hat, giving me just the perfect amount of shade to keep the sun out of my vision. But she was a persistent witch, the sun, and so found ways into my eyes by reflecting off the water. I recalled reading about how reflection of the sun were top reasons why sunburns were particularly nasty out at sea and in the icy wastelands of the world. Water was just evil and actively out to get you like that. You dare drink me? I’ll burn your goddamn face off and hit you with a rake! To cope with that heat, I made sure to have my canteen—filled with fresh water—out should I need it.

I was sure I hadn’t taken a drink of anything for a while; the Colta-Cola didn’t seem to matter to the hints of thirst in my throat. But I didn’t want to take the drink. Something about the thirst was vaguely appealing to me, as if bearing the feeling would... make Cards and Dust start making out or whatever stallions were all into in Equestria. Or maybe it was a sort of vague penance for what I’d done. But I had to focus on the living, back to Lightning Dust and Cards.

Speaking of whom, the mares were sitting silently on the far side of the boat, their hips touching. Cards looked almost adorably pudgy in her black armor, its little chest protection and clothey short-shorts; and Dust just looked like she’d just told a really racist joke in front of a crowd of minorities, hoping someone would laugh and make her joke okay, her hooves folded neatly in her lap.

But as the lake gave into the swamp and I made the first rows in the quest to navigate the swamp with the little map spread out across the boat’s floor, Dust spoke up. “Hey, GB. Why aren’t you rowing with your magic?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, moving the oars with rhythmic motions of the arms.

She shrugged, nudging Cards. “Well, I just thought that since you’re a unicorn, you’d just, like, use magic to row.”

I cocked a brow. “Why use telekinesis when raw flesh, bone, and muscle does the job just as good if not better?” She shrugged again. “I can’t say how you must see it, but where I’m from, it’s seen as illogical to use telekinesis when you don’t have to. Of course, while I should probably still refer to it as ‘magic’ for your convenience, the Reich and I are of the opinion that telekinesis isn’t actually magic but just a unicorn’s natural psychic ability. The point is, there is honor in manual labor.” I almost unconsciously glanced down to my breast, to the mutilation I knew was under the clothing, and thought of what it meant. “Arbeit adelt,” I said cooly; “work ennobles.”

Lightning Dust didn’t say anything further, and I decided not to pursue the matter of interrogating her about why she thought I wouldn’t use my perfectly able flesh to row. Then the matter of picturing my mother naked came to mind as I heard some sort of frog croaking, and a question bubbled onerously to the forefront of my mind. It seemed like the exact sort of thing I’d normally ask, and it felt like a good way to try to forget Sleepy Oaks.

“What’s the legal age of sexual consent in Equestria?” I asked. “Because where I’m from, it is fourteen years of age, which always struck me as odd, since the legal age you can volunteer for the Rheinwehr is sixteen, but school typically ends around seventeen–eighteen years.”

Cards cocked a brow. “School ends at eighteen? That’s crazy. Ends here at, like, fifteen–sixteen.”

I blinked as I thought back to all of the stupid things I’d seen in Equestria, like the lack of ingredients lists and the mere existence of Juggernog. “A whole lot of things just started making a whole lot of sense all of the sudden.” And I rowed on without further comment.

Silence reigned for a time, then Cards prodded Dust with a question—something about cwtches, I don’t know, I wasn’t paying any attention. They giggled at something like laughwolves. Cards glanced to me, then prodded Dust with a hoof to the ribs. Dust then said, or rather, solemnly singsonged something.

“Gafflwn Dihenydd O’r fuddugol yn wiriol sydd.

Ni fydd neb yn ein drechu.

Falch ydy ni I drochu, Traed o flaen I’Annwn, mewn y gwybodaeth fe godwn ni.”

I blinked, momentarily snapped out of my self-induced daze. Cards cooed with awe. “Whoa. And what does that mean?”

Dust bit her lip and looked to be lost in thought for a moment. Then she spoke up in that same singsonging tone.

“We dare cheat death his rightful victory,

We are beyond defeat.

We are glad to plunge headlong into Annwn, knowing that we will rise.”

The pegasus finished with an almost bashful smile. “Mom taught me that herself; it’s a line from some old battle poetry ancient warriors used to say before a fight. It’s a bit weird in Equestrian, but I can sort of translate the language, sort of can’t.

“Sounds almost familiar,” I noted pretty much like how a desperate stallion will comment on any similarities he has with the pretty girl he’s failing to charm. They turned to me, and with my mind in a different place, I said: “Wir sind unbezwingbar, denn selbst dem Gevatter Tod ringen wir seinen rechtmäßigen sieg aus der Hand. Froh sind wir, zu denen zu gehören, die mit dem Haupt vorran in die Hölle preschen, in dem Wissen, dass wir uns immer wieder erheben werden.”

“And that means?” Dust prompted, like a bad actor being held at knife-point because the guy with the knife had delusions of literary grandeur, and needed her to enact the lines from the terribad play he wrote.

“We are unconquerable, for we wrestle from Godfather Death himself his rightful victory. Glad are we to be amongst those who dash head-first into Hell, knowing that we will rise again.” I looked at Dust. “It’s a little poem they have amongst the Höllenstürmer, the Hellstormers, an elite unit of pegasus shock troopers in the Reich.”

Like a dog about to be put down as his beloved master watched on without a care in his eye, I flashed back to the happier days of my youth, to that girl, the first real girl in my life, and her status in the Höllenstürmer. Funny how life had a way of ruining everything nice, and I just had to laugh it off because I’d be damned if I let life win. So I forced a smile and a chuckle. “Just an observation,” I dismissed. “Please, what were you saying about your mother?” Just. Keep. Smiling.

“She, uh, was from up north,” Dust said, fidgeting with her forehooves, “even had a vague brogue that she gave me as a filly. I had to get rid of it once school first started, in fact.”

“Really?” Cards asked, mercifully taking the conversation out of my incapable hooves.

Dust took a deep breath through her nose, then said in a very singsongy, extremely liquid accent: “Iechyd da, Lightie! Fed up with you, I am, bach Dustie. Oh, ych a fi! Dustie, would ya get ya dwp dad to get ’ere? I got hiraeth for the cywoedd of home and some old tref cwrn. Oh, Lightie, don’t be sad—come her and give Mammy a cwtsch!” She feigned a cough and pounded a hoof over her breast. “Yech. If I start speaking like that for too long, I’ll never get rid of the accent.”

“She really spoke like that?” Cards giggled.

“Well, only the one time when she got really drunk and then dad...” She rubbed the back of her head. “In a way, I suppose, I’m only half-Equestrian on my father’s side. Mom was from the cwms up north: her native accent was real fluid and just sounded awesome. Wish Dad hadn’t pretty much beaten it out of her...”

The two went silent. I returned to not giving a damn about them. Instead, I went over to brooding over just how awesome leather dusters were, and how I could make mine make more awesome noises and generally look badass in the wind.

|— ☩ —|

The onerous task of rowing through kilometers of serpentine swamps into the heart of the Acolapissa was not without its amusements. Namely, the quiet little snore from Cards as she curled up on the boat’s floor, where she’d ended up after dozing off. Were I not rowing, I would have reached out and poked Cards on the face and said “Touch” again. On the other side of things was Lightning Dust, sitting on the boat’s bench, wide-awake, looking at both everything and nothing.

As it was, I rowed the boat through the silence, knowing everything that could be wrong was wrong. This was a backwater swamp, yet I hadn’t even been buzzed by a single mosquito. That was a paradox. But a paradox was just the truth standing on its head to attract attention because the truth was a little floozy like that.

My vision was as clear as the murk-muddled rain water as I listened to the quiet snores in-between the sloshes of the paddles, like some sort of obscenely pretentious metaphor for life. For the record, allegorical works of fiction tended to suck really hard, because they cared more for the allegory and not for the actual here-and-now story of the work. Just my ten cents, since my two cents were free.

My eyes eventually drifted from my surroundings to the map, then settled onto Lightning Dust as she was stretching her wings out. Dust snapped her wings back to herself as she caught me staring lazily. She shifted how she was sitting, pointedly not meeting my gaze, instead looking at the floor of the boat. With a calm but not slow motion, she brought a part of her wing to her mouth. As if she wasn’t consciously aware, Dust nibbled at her feathers. Preening, that’s what it was called. She was preening in an almost absentminded way, like her head was somewhere away.

Then she blinked and glanced at me. Dust blinked again, and slowly, extremely slowly, took the wing from her mouth and set it to rest, furled behind her back alongside its sister-wing. The mare offered me a curt, forced smile before returning her attention to everything that most certainly was not me.

I looked at the map. We must have been really close to where we needed to go. My thoughts threatened to dwell on Sleepy Oaks, the image of Doc Dome’s daughter searing the back of my eyes. Meditate upon the face of your father. I looked up. “It seems so many ponies have strained relations with their parents.”

Lightning Dust blinked hard. “Excuse me?”

With a sigh, I looked to Cards. “In the Reich, there is mantra, one that comes from the days when a stallion earned his sword—his true sword that he too would pass down too one day—from his father. They’ll tell you to meditate upon the face of your father, too.” I repeated to her the mantra that’d gone on in my head as I butchered Sleepy Oaks.

“What does that even mean?” Dust asked. “Because it just sounds like… I dunno, but it doesn’t really make much sense.”

I cracked a small grin, like a lion licking his lips before he gets devoured by a flock of rabid geese. The goose was the lion’s natural predator, after all. “It’s something many are taught when learning to use the sword. It is a mantra meant to help you relax, and thus to wield the sword better. Emotion is often the enemy of the warrior. Yet the mantra is deeper: a way of seeing the act of swinging the sword not as just a person swinging a sword but as the sword being an extension of the self.”

Lightning Dust just stared at me. Whether in thought or because she’d suddenly gone brain-dead, I couldn’t tell. Then, rather suddenly, she said, “Can I meditate upon the face of my mother? She’s more inspiring to me than… anypony, really.”

“Yes, of course,” I replied. Did you just actually make her think about the face of the father who beat her mother and quite possibly beat her, too? You’re a dick. An actual penis. “You must have loved her more than your father, right?”

“I… I loved my mother,” Dust said, “but not my father. For him, I have a begrudging, hateful respect. He told me he didn’t want me to be stuck in a dead-end life like he was in, with nothing of value in the world.” She bit down on her hoof in though, her eyes moving slowly from place to place as if lost in a memory. “He told me that the only way to get anywhere in life was to be better than everypony else: better, faster, stronger. Leave others in the dust… the lightning dust.” Licking her lips, she looked at Cards. “In a way, I should thank him. His constant… efforts to be a father got me to the top, I had my dream so close I could smell it. And in the end, because I listened to my father, I lost everything I ever had—” she looked at me, shaking her head “—and ever wanted. And sometimes we don’t ever get a second chance.”

I let the silence sit for just long enough. “This must be difficult to talk about, I imagine,” I said, and she nodded. “Have you ever talked with anyone about this before?”

She cracked a wry little smile for a fraction of an instant. “That’s the thing, GB: no one’s ever even cared to ask.”

The dusty eyes of a dead filly flashed in my mind’s eye. “Sometimes, Lightning Dust, it’s good to talk about things with ponies who can understand your suffering.”

“Yeah, it’s—” her eyes slowly ambled across the floor of the boat, as is searching for something she both desperately wanted and yet couldn’t care less about “—it’s good to have friends.” She didn’t say anything after that, just looked off as if in a dream. Soon, too, I could see the shore of an island. The tall reeds and cattails gave it away rather than hid it. And if those weren’t enough, I could see a small number of mossy wooden boats and an shoddily-made wooden dock.

I watched as Dust prodded Cards. “Hey, hey!” she whispered. “Wake up.”

With a deep intake of breath, Cards opened her eyes. “Wha’?”

“We’re here.”

|— ☩ —|

With all the speed of a pregnant mare whose legs I broke because she was the fiancée of Jeepers, we got off the boat and onto the dock. I idly wondered if that mare was okay, and if she had a permanent fear of being glued into tight spaces after what I did to her.

Cards yawned like a stretching cat as we finally got ready to move out. “How long was I asleep?”

“A few hours,” I said. “Sleep well?”

“Not… not really,” she replied, shaking her head. “I kept dreaming about everyone in Sleepy Oaks being dead.” Cards scrunched her face slightly and look to the side.“Like, I’ll come home and just find them all dead.”

The heart in my chest was suddenly pumping ice through my veins. I patted her on the shoulder, even though she flinched from my touch. “I’m sure they’ll be fine. No need to worry. I mean, really.”

Cards perked an ear. “Really what?”

I shook my head. “Oh, sorry. That’s as far as I got with that thought. It just sort of ended there.” I led the way up the dock and onto the island proper. Past the reeds and tall grass was a raggedy camp, many large and once-white tents stood like giants flaunting their superiority over a thoroughly unamused toad. So then the toad thought it’d be hilarious to just tear up bits of the tents and make the tents look like toilet paper in general.

But that was the thing. The damage and ruin the tents had undergone didn’t look natural or just solely from age. It was as if someone had done it on purpose with the intent to make it look like nature’d had its way with the cloth tents. What’s more, there weren’t any bodies or signs of old blood or any struggles. It looke at once sterile and a mess.

Rounding the corner of a large tent which had likely served as some sort of command center, I saw why there weren’t any bodies as the ponies all slowly turned to face me. They were in white robes soiled by age and the swamp, their faces all covered by a white porcelain mask. Looking at the nearest one, I saw that the porcelain masks had been nailed, literally nailed, into their faces.

They looked at me in the same way a cat eyes a mouse intending to capture and sell it into the circus. Cards and Lightning Dust just stared back, like sunstruck fools. At the far end of this little courtyard between the various tents was what looked like a little stairway leading into the stygian abyss where no doubt the Devil’s Backbone was cowering like a little girl without a mother during menarche.

“Well then,” I sighed. “Listen up, you whatever-you-ares! I am in no goddamn mood! Cards here is in no Celestia-damn mood! And I won’t pretend to speak for Lightning Dust’s mood. But in my case, here’s how it’s going to work: either stand aside or cease to exist. There are no other options.” I shook my head. “I get it, you’re probably all mind-controlled slaves of the Devil’s Backbone or whatever, but I really, really don’t care. I get how you’re trying to be all spooky with the masks and the white robes and whatnot, and you probably spent a lot of time dressing up for us, but I’m too damn tired to care.”

Pulling out my bloodless sword and wearing a frown on my face, I walked forwards. “Come on, girls. Stay close.” My eyes went from my sword to the some twenty–thirty ought ponies. “If any of you bastards gets any ideas, I will kill you all.” What was another thirty things added to my daily kill-count?

As we were about half of the way to the the hole in the ground, one of them—a mare, by the looks of it—moved. She came at me, not with any speed or open hostility, but like she was a lost in a dream, and was coming up to ask me for direction on where to find the depraved sex-type things part of dreamland. The expression of her porcelain mask, like all the other masks here, was of a look of dumb regret, like the look of a dog who’s just realized that no, he cannot play the piano with his penis, unlike his friend, the cat. They were like the congregation of the damned.

Suddenly, I found myself wondering what it’d be like to be a productive member of society, like a priest instead of the mass-murdering hero errant I was. Or maybe a cult leader. Yes, Father Jericho, the Prophet of the Great Boxing Octopus, who freed the crab people from slavery. Together, brothers and sisters, we can join forces to defeat the evil of the lying waffles, who betrayed our great god during the lesser simulacrum. There. New religion established.

“Hello,” I offered to the shambling mare, “would you like to join my new, dopey religious cult?”

The robed mare just stopped right there, within touching distance. Though it was impossible to truly see her eyes through her mask, I could tell she was looking into my eyes. There was a special chemical that activates in the body when you make eye contact, a very handy tool in social interactions. But other than that, it was, needless to say, very eventful as she stared at me and nothing happened. Yep.

Cards let out a quiet moan. With a confused blink, I looked over at her, only to see another robed mare dangerously close to her. And by Dust there was a robed stallion. They didn’t do anything, but still Cards grit her teeth and looked as if she was particularly constipated after having eaten a box of nails.

And then Lightning Dust, standing there like wet cat cornered by a pitbull, whimpered. “GB? What are you talking about?” She flinched, ears going limp. “Rainbow Dash? No, she’s a liar!—don’t believe her! Please, GB, don’t! I am good enough! Please, don’t! Don’t… please…”

In a moment, I understood exactly what was going on. I’d seen it before somewhere. Maybe in a campaign of Dunkelheit und Drachen. Although I had my sword ready, I hesitated as Cards screamed, “Make the voices stop!” And in an instant, my sword went clean through the neck of the nearest robed mare, her head flying clean off her body in a way that I should not in any way have been able to do. Her death satisfied the Kodex, but the Code needed a real sacrifice to be repaired. And that sacrifice was so close, so near, and I didn’t have time for this chickenshit.

The mare closest to Cards snapped her attention to me, making a sound not unlike that of a very angry cat trapped in a fishbowl with a piranha. With a single cleave of my sword, she lost her a leg and collapsed to the ground. “Nyo!” I reprimanded in a childish tone. “That’s a bad kitty!” With the speed of particularly agile dwarf hamster, I picked up her severed leg—“Seems like I’ve got a leg up on the world!”—and hurled it hoof-first at the stallion near Dust.

His face mask shattered into oblivion as the hoof hit him, and his body fell limp to the ground. The face, I saw, was mutilated, bits of the mask still nailed into his face; but his eyes and mouth were sewn shut with raggedly black threads, a strange eye-like insignia painted across his face with a slightly phosphorescent material.

Instantly, all the robed ponies just tumbled to the ground like puppets with their strings cut by an octopus learning the joy of using scissors to cut things that aren’t his. I looked at the mares as I waited for them to get ahold of themselves, tapping my hoof and humming a quick little song to pass the time. My attention rapt to the dead stallion. His face was not unlike that poppet that Jeepers had used to cast the spell that he himself was incapable of. In fact, now that I looked at it, it was almost exactly the same thing. And being that his death had caused the others to collapse, he must have been the poppet controlling the others.

“So. The archaeological team was turned into poppets, then?” I muttered, rubbing my chin.

Dust, lying on the ground and rubbing her head, looked up at me. “GB?” she asked.

“Oh, there it goes. I was starting to get worried,” I replied with a smile. “I believe those things were some sort of enervation conduit, some sort of thing to mess with your mind, at least. You were just moaning on the ground; I was worried you’d go insane and try to kill me… again.”

She bit her lip. “I… I’d never let myself do that do a… to a friend.” She took a breath. “For a moment, I saw the worst thing possible, and my head hurt a lot.” With a sudden jerk of the head, she looked right into my eyes: “I’m good enough, right? You-you wouldn’t ever just le—abandon me, right?”

I ruffled her mane with a hoof, smiling warmly and reassuringly. “Of course not, Lightning Dust.” First comes smiles, then the lies. Last is the clash of steel. “We’re confederates in this together.” I helped her up. “We’d better not tarry here.”

Next was Cards whom I helped up. “You,” she groaned as I brushed the dirt out of her black-with-red-streaks mane. It seemed to take her a moment to realize I was touching her, and when she did, she jumped back. “I… what was that? Those… things?” She looked at the corpses strewn about haphazardly.

I made dull note that Lightning Dust was holding a camera and taking a few pictures as I explained to Cards my theory and how I’d saved her life and how we were totally equal for the whole ruining her life and cutting off a part of her ear things. Well, I didn’t specifically mention that last part, but it was heavily implied by my body language. When it was over, Cards sighed.

“When they were doing that… thing to me,” she said, “a dark voice kept screaming in my head that you had killed everypony I ever knew. And it kept flashing these images of your murdering Sleepy Oaks, butchering mares and children.” Card gritted her teeth and shook my head. “I think it was trying to make me attack you for… something. I think it was like you said: it plays off fears.”

I chuckled. First come smiles. “Yeah, like I could butcher an entire town. Or that I could even possibly harm a child.” Then the lies.

Cards frowned. “What did you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Why? You can’t tell me you don’t have any fears.”

My worst fear already came true today: that I will become a monster. “Nope. Guess I’m just utterly fearless. But come on, ladies, we need to get moving. There’s no telling what could happen out here.”

I lead the way through the congregation of the damned, resisting the strong urge to put them all into sexually compromising positions so that in thousands of years when archaeologist of the future find this place, their entire perception of history would be utterly screwed and all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories would occur. The thing that had looked to me like a staircase was actually just a very large hole in the the side of a rock mound, one whose incline down had been grooved into impromptu stairs at some point.

The mound led about a story or two into the earth, where we came upon a large chamber of crystalline architecture, like a buried city street, strewn all about with small camps and tables and junk put here no doubt by the archaeologists. It was all lit by brightly glowing crystals on or perhaps partially in the walls. The more the crystals bathed me in their colorless light, the more I was convinced that I was suddenly sterile.

Going up to the big table at one end of the cavernous street, I was dead certain I’d find a Voixson or something. Instead, I let out a groan as I just found the diary of the expedition leader. Probably the guy who recorded the Voixson in the sheriff’s office. I flipped it open, not really reading anything. Of note was that he mentioned this resembled the architecture of some ruins found up north belonging to the long-forgotten, long-extinct, and pre-Equestrian “Crystal Empire”. That, and how near the end, they found some sort of ancient magical “lift”, explored the underground there, and how the architecture of the ruins further down resembled absolutely nothing; the author actually speculated that the original ruins were actually an archaeological camp dedicated to the “antediluvian” ruins further down.

“Boring,” I commented, and tossed the journal over my shoulder. Dust took another few photographs as I looked down the street to the building where the lift had been mentioned. “Come on, ladies.”

And down the cave we went. The building at the end looked like it was artificially grown from crystals, and this room looked like a lobby. Even after eons of rotting to itself, it still smelled of impatience. At one end of the ocular room was a familiar structure, if only because it had been clearly marked with indicators and a panel, since it had been termed differently than I was used to.

“Is that an elevator?” Cards asked, tilted her head to the side. “What in Tartarus?” It was now safe to say that Dust was just taking lots of photos. No need for me to make note of it anymore. “Why is this here?”

“Press it and find out,” I suggested.

She gave me a hesitant look, like she suspected me to just shout, startle her, then shove her into a well where she would know nothing but eternal humiliation for all eternity at the hooves of a small child. It was a very specific look. Finally, she gave in, walked up to it, and pressed the button that either called forth the elevator or sacrificed a virgin to a pagan god. Being that Cards was still alive, it had to be the former.

I heard the sound of magical parts moving. It was too damn slow. I needed to get down there and kill that demonic bastard now, goddammit! The Kodex had to be forged anew; those children needed to be avenged!

Then it arrived, making a weird humming noise like a billion distant hummingbirds having the world’s most lackluster orgy. The doors opened, and inside was a dirty-looking room that seemed to be made of onyx, with two illuminating crystals. Shaking my head and just wanting to get this charade over with, I got onto the elevator, and the two mares followed. There were two buttons, and I pressed the down button.

Instantly, my stomach was in my throat as I felt the floor beneath me fall at a controlled but fast pace. Gritting my teeth, I felt like I could barely breath. A crawling sensation spread from my gut to my privates as the speed approached what felt like freefall. Cards and Dust stood around like nothing, Dust even preening herself with the same blank, unthinking look as earlier.

Then, suddenly, it was over. With that same humming noise of the ladybirds faking a poor semblance of sexual ecstasy, the doors opened. I stumbled out, gasping for breath. My first instinct was to lean against the wall. But when I did, I only found my breath laughing at me as it leapt from my chest and went on to do cooler and better things, wherein it immediately got inhaled and enslaved by Cards.

There were bits of crystalline structures and stuff clearly brought up by the archaeologists in front of the elevator, even what looked like an old statue of a diamond dog, but none of that mattered compared to what lay beyond the camp outside the elevator. At the end of the camp was a large river, flowing noisily through the darkness of the cave from my left to my right, its extreme sides disappearing into dark tunnels that looked downright artificial, the angles far too straight and smooth. The stone bridge that crossed the river, I saw as I slowly approached it, was kept alight by those same glowing crystal. Each breath of air tasted like water and limestone.

The far bank of the river looked less like anything made by nature, more like the edge of a train station, like the river was simply flowing across the tracks. Clearly, it was built by the worst architect ever. The statues of the diamond dogs on the far side of the bridge watched me as I approached the wall of darkness just beyond the far bank of the river. Cards called out for me, but I kept walking forwards. Weird or not, there was a demon to kill.

“GB, I don’t like caves, ” Dust said, keeping close to one side of me. “There’s nowhere to fly in here.”

“I promise you, Lightning Dust, Ace Reporter,” I replied, not bothering to look at her, “we shall be out of here soon enough.” Glancing over to her, I saw her chewing on her lip. We’re not stopping. The Code must be repaired. “Trust me.”

As we were halfway across the bridge, a splashing sound from the dark waters below the bridge caught my attention. Great, I thought with a groan, it’s a tentacle monster that wants me to teach it a thing or two about love. Looking out into the water, I thought I saw a thick, fleshy thingy sloshing against the current for just a moment. Couldn’t have been bigger than a dolphin. After that, it was under the water and it did not come back up. Well, that certainly won’t end up eating my face off.

Up close, the bank of the river—or at least the little area cut out of the rock—resembled the bare ribs of some long-rotten beast, the dark pillars like that of an U-Bahn station that kept the those kinds of underground train stations from collapsing. This little place even had a roof a good few feet above my head. With a sudden flickering, the darkness of this place died as strange lights came to life. More of those crystals of plus-three testicular cancer, I noticed. In the light, I could see that the pillars of stone here were the color of ancient teeth—but more importantly, there was a wooden table with a Voixson on it!

Letting out a childish gasp of glee, I ran up to the Voixson and picked it up. “Look, Cards, look!” I enthused. “It’s a thing.” The mares walked up to me. Dust kept looking over her shoulder as if expecting a clown to jump out and touch her privates with a balloon animal. “Want to listen?”

“Uh…” Cards droned as I set the device on the table and pressed play.

I smiled, waiting for it to start up. Then I frowned as I hit the play button several mores time. “Oh, you slut! Slut!” I hissed. “You were never used!”

“Wouldn’t that make it a virgin?” Card asked, and I silenced her with a murderous look.

The murderous looks turned into a depressed frown. “Aww, this is worse than that time I learned about that scar on my penis.”

Dust jerked her head to me, apparently forgetting about Bimbo the clown. “Wait, say what? You have a scar on it?”

Rubbing my chin, I said, “Well, technically two, one from nature, one from a ritual genital mutilation we in the Reich perform on newborn male infants. So, where I’m from, every stallion has them.”

Dust opened and closed her jaw at me. Cards, on the other hoof, just sighed. “I don’t wanna ask, but I’m pretty sure you’d just tell me anyways.”

I shrugged. “Well, really early in-uterus, the sex of a fetus isn’t yet determined exactly, and the default gender of a pony is female. But then the Y-Chromosom activates, the body suddenly stops doing female things; however, by that part, the body has already grown some semblance of nipples and labia. The nipples stay around on us stallions; the labia fuse into the shaft of the penis.” I nodded sagely. “I’d go on about how on the bottom of the shaft there is a scar running from the glands to the scrotum, but… no, wait, I just said it. Well, I went on. I remember how in school I used to go sit at random tables filled with lonely-looking ponies, and one of the things I’d often talk about was that scar, since it always amused them to know all penises were original labias.” I smiled. “Ponies are so fascinating, aren’t they?”

They just stared at me. Dust offered a blank “Well then”, but Cards just stood there.

“Das Y-Chromosom is the dominant one over the female’s X,” I finished.

“Ewp-sil-on kroh-moh-zome?” Dust muttered.

“Oh, sorry,” I chuckled. “You pronounce the letter as ‘wai’, I pronounce it like ‘Üpsilon’. Sometimes I forget that Equestrians—” my tone dropped to dead and serious “—have no grasp of science. Because Üpsilonts have very common scientific and mathematical uses.”

Cards, after glancing at her lightly armored flank, blinked at me. “I am swimming in an ocean of confusion right about now.”

The image of filly Cards trying and failing to doggy paddle in the kiddy pool came to mind. And then a giant tsunami came along and took her away. The wittle water wings didn’t help. I jabbed a hoof at her. “Cards, you stay away from that ocean—you’ll drown!”

“Uh, I can swim.” She cocked a brow.

“I’m only saying it because I don’t want you to die or get hurt… any more than you have already.” I nodded. It occurred to me that there a large doorway at the back end of the this little platform, minding me of the large double-doors in a grand cathedral, only bigger. “You are perfectly adorable just the way you’re hurt right now. That mutilated ear? That black eye? I could just put you in a cage and poke you with a stick for decades.”

Card just blankly stared at me. “’Kay.”

“Good girl,” I chirped, trotting over to the large cathedral-like doors. They had the look of doors meant to look big and were hard to open and close, since its churchgoers were always eager to leave. It was probably a fire hazard, too. If I still had that firefighter’s axe from the Songnam Slaughter… God doesn’t always dish in your face, I thought as I poked at the thick door. Most times, but not always.

The doors opened just as easy as I’d thought. Because it was awesome, I manually shoved the doors apart from the very center so that they exploded away from me. I promptly slammed my face against the doors. It turned out that although the doors did push forwards slightly, that was the fault of loose hinges. The doors, in fact, opened outwards.

“Goddamn,” I groaned, rubbing my countenance as I lay on my back, “still one of my many one weaknesses.” I stood up quick as I could. “Dumme Tür…” This time, the doors opened, and I didn’t care that I almost whacked Cards with them. “There. You are now open,” I spat, and marched into the… darkness. Sighing, I groused, “Great. Never easy. Also gotta make this annoying. Now, where did I put that lamp I nicked from the boathouse?”

“Couldn’t you just use your magic?” a voice that I really hoped wasn’t Lightning Dust asked. “Just light stuff up, y’know?”

With all the menacing horror of a little filly just standing there and staring silently, I pretty much did my best imitation of said thing towards Lightning Dust. Only, I wasn’t wearing a dainty little dress. Which, thinking about it as I stared, was probably a good thing. Or maybe not. Why were skirts now considered a feminine piece of clothing when all that extra room would be so lovely to have when you’ve got this hunk of flesh and muscle hanging between your legs?

“I should really invest in a skirt or a kilt or something, don’t you think?” I asked.

Lightning Dust blinked at me, looked as if she was searching, for words, then just gave up. On the other hand, Cards perked her good ear up. “Can you buy me a dress first?”

“Pardon me?”

“You know, a dress.” She nodded. “Can you buy me a dress if you’re going to a place where they sell skirts?”

“No!” I scoffed loudly. “Absolutely not!” Her ears fell limp. “Cards, if you wore something with so much fabric, you’d probably strangle yourself to death somehow! I don’t know how, but you’d find a way. I know how you are with things, Cards.”

She tilted her head to the side. The damn mare hadn’t actually entered the dark room with me. “Things?”

“Yes, Cards, with things.” I almost explained what that meant, almost, but somehow I didn’t. In case you were wondering, that explanation was, simply put: “You go on a date, and you end up pretty much kidnapped and half-liquified. You go to save your town, and you kill your best friend and end up on Team Jericho. You attempt to incapacitate one of the two ponies who’ve been ruining your town, and instead you break the neck of a single father which, in turn, probably made his foals starve to death hilariously. You try to say hi to your estranged mother, and instead you accidentally beat her to death. It’s irresponsible of me enough that I let you out in the sunlight—God only knows what you’ll do with a dress!” But by the graces of God—aw, who’m I kidding? It was probably Satan—I managed to figure out not to say that just before I said it.

For some reason, the thought that I could’ve probably killed Card in at least six different ways at this exact moment ran through my mind. It made my eye twitch. With the Code broken, it wasn’t dresses that were Cards’ greatest danger, it was me. I couldn’t be trusted without the Kodex. A rather… unsettling thought crossed my mind. It involved me committing against Cards and Dust that most unthinkable of acts. I found myself shuddering. Of course, I had self control and never ever would I ever so much as half-seriously contemplate doing that most unthinkable of acts. Then again, that was exactly what I thought about harming… about killing children.

What in God’s name was I doing just standing here? Oh, yeah, right. I was getting out a lamp. Wee, was it hot in here all of the sudden, or was it the flaming lamp? Probably the lamp. Heh. Ooh, these walls were pretty. Very bland and ignored as I hastily trotted down the little hall. Somepony needed to come down here and make some graffiti about griffons goring gorgons garishly gobsmacked and good-like. But they were still pretty. Cards and Dust were following me, right? Good. They were. Or bad. They were. Don’t think about what would have happened last night between you and Dust if you didn’t have the Kodex. Don’t think about what you would have done to Cards as she begged for mercy without the Kodex. Blossom! That was name of Doc Dome’s filly, the one I’d killed, had watched as her body was torn apart by my instinct. Don’t think about her. Don’t you think about her!

“Stop running so fast!” Cards yelled out for me, and I ground to a halt.

“Running? Who’s running I’m not running nope not running just walking because Jericho is not a monster nope certainly can find the Kodex danger not are you in—I’m not secretly a cephalopod standing atop a swarm of guinea pigs in a stallion suit.” My eye twitched.

“Um, was there even a period in that sentence?” Cards asked as she trotted up to me.

“Sorry, I’m just…” I searched for words to tell her. That was a rare feeling. “I’m just so eager to kill that demon.” I actually thought about adding, “But first I’m going to kill you, if only so I can rest easy that I won’t hurt you without the Code.” But had I really started to degrade so far without the Code already? If so, why bother to go on at all? Why, if I had turned into one of the very creatures I exterminated with extreme prejudice? Also, it didn’t make any sense, but I came to that realization last.

Apparently, while thinking that, I’d just been standing there with a blank look on my face. Lightning Dust hesitantly extended a hoof and poked my chest. “GB? Ya okay?”

I blinked. No, I do not get aroused thinking of my mother’s corpse! the quote of someone echoed in my mind, but for the life of me, I didn’t know who. Or what. “No,” I sighed. Hey, Lightning Dust, I murdered a bunch of kids. Isn’t that great? Don’t you just want to lie to me again in a poor attempt to make me buy you a damn drink? Play not nice with me—I know why you’re really here. “I’m just in a bad way. I’m scared for you two. I realize I’ve dragged you into a really, really bad situation, and now I don’t want to deal with you two nice girls dying because of that really bad stallion.” Well, that was technically the truth.

Lightning Dust flashed me a smile. “Aw, that’s actually kinda sweet.”

“Uncharacteristically so,” Cards muttered, and earned herself a quick glare from Dust. I glanced at Cards, who was eying me not unlike the reporter. From this angle, it could see them both equally staring at me, in fact, their faces bathed in the eerie glow of the lantern.

She does have nice eyes, though.

For a moment, it was like I’d just been shot in the chest. The only reason I didn’t stumble back was because it didn’t dawn on me to be such a drama queen just then. That thought did not just happen. I looked between Dust and Cards like a pitbull eyes a toddler’s face. Or so it felt like. So I closed my eyes and took a breath. There was no amorous pounding in chest, no fire in my groin, and there never had been. Everything was under control. Ever was, ever will be.

Except for Sleepy Oaks.

I felt a pang, a deep, reproachful surge in my shallow heart. Dread clawed its way into the organ like a cat digging into the bucket of tuna. And suddenly, as I looked into their eyes, I was a colt again, and it was not their eyes I was looking into but the steely and hot eyes of he who helped me forge the Kodex. Not my father, just a wise, older earth pony, a friend.

“If you have given up your heart for what you believe is right, Jericho,” he said in that cool yet knowing tone that made him the majority whip in the Reichstag, “you have already lost. That without heart is too that without love, and that without love is too a beast. Of course, you can be a beast, but not freely: he who makes a beast out of himself may get rid of the pain of being a Mann, but that Hell will reap its own price from him.”

“But what if I still got what I wanted, even as a beast?” I had asked. “What if I should save the world, but leave my heart as payment for that victory?”

The stallion had just looked at me. “Impossible. Even King Viktor der Landesvater had some semblance of a heart. You’ve read Ich, Vikor; you know what Viktor was, he was just like you. King Viktor had a code, and its foremost pillar was simple: ‘If the ends are the benefit of the Reich and its people, the means are justified; and as King, I alone can justify the ends.’ With his code, he performed monstrous acts but never became a monster, and we remember him as one of history’s greatest leaders for it.”

He took off his reading glasses off and set them on the desk. I knew that he didn’t need glasses, but he wore them sometimes because it made him look more genuine and down-to-earth to the voters. “But were there nought but darkness in your heart, what could you do on your quest but degenerate into a monster? To gain one’s object as but a beast would only be bitterly comic. But to gain your object as a monster, well, to pay hell is one thing… but do you want to own it?”

“And,” I tried, and stopped to lick my lips. “What should happen if I become a monster? If I—if I broke the code?”

“The only way to deal with a monster,” he said simply, without hesitation, “is to kill it.”

I shook my head of the thoughts. “Angst and brooding are for sissies and lame writers who want to pretend like their story has weight and depth. And also for the existentialist movement,” I counseled the mares before turning back around and—ow, stupid door! Why was there a door here? How had I not seen this? Oh oh oh, great. Great. Wooden door. Rotten wood. Horn stabbed through the wood. Head hurt. Oh Prophet, I was just going to end up losing my damn horn today, wasn’t I?

Growling, I pulled my head out of the door, and the door promptly fell inwards. “Hey, look. It didn’t fall on me,” I remarked, and then I frowned.

Alongside me, the girls peered into the large room beyond the doorway. “Oh, fuckberries,” Cards groaned.

“You know, I’d ask who built this,” I said as I looked at what I could of what looked pretty much exactly like the gotischen cathedrals of the Fatherland, “but I’m pretty sure God’s just screwing with me at this point.”

This door appeared to be large, though single, door into the front-side area of a massive stone cathedral. It was bright inside, lit by bright, colorless lights from above. There were the wooden pews, even stained glass windows depicting… things I didn’t recognize, but even they appeared as if they were outside in the sun, like there was a light behind them shining in. It just had that feeling of unnecessary symbolism. Like some cosmic entity, some accursed scribe in Heaven, had heard my plea to Duke Elkington for my symbolic nonsense, and still thought it the epitome of hilarity to shove the damn things down my face.

As I looked around, the room flickered as if it were a dying fire. A vague feeling of knowing exactly why it looked like a cathedral crossed my mind. The feeling was reinforced by Cards’ nonsensical line about forncating berries, which seemed totally out of place. “Cards, Lightning Dust, what do you see in the room?”

“Canterlot Castle,” Cards and Dust said at once.

Rubbing the bridge of my nose, I sighed. “Okay. So. While I don’t know why, I’m not seeing Canterlot Castle… nor do I know what it even looks like. I, however, am seeing a massive cathedral. In fact… I think it might actually be the Hohe Domkirche Laurentie—the High Cathedral of Laurentia—the legendary cathedral located in the capital city of the Reich, Zentrum.” I shrugged. “Nice place. Father used to take me there when I lived in Zentrum. But listen, I’ll be right back, and you two stay here.” I set the lantern of the ground by their hooves and trotted back down the hall.

When I came back, I was holding that unused Voixson from earlier. Before they could ask what I was doing, I hurled the Voixson into the room and shouted, “Attere Dominatum!” The thrown object clattering to the stone floor and slid to the halt. “Huh,” I said dumbly. “Well, that was anticlimactic. I was sort of expecting it to, I don’t know, destroy the illusion, or maybe hit some invisible wizard on the face, or prompt him to tell us to pay no attention to the stallion behind the curtain.”

“So…” Dust droned on. I blinked at her. She was still wearing the Kruzifix. I actually hadn’t bothered to take it off her. Perhaps it was something unspeakable in me speaking, but there was something charming about the way it looked on her. Oh, but I bet it’d look even cuter on Cards!

Just as I was about to form a thought, a slithering voice crept through my ears. It made my hair stand up on end, which for some reason made me feel all fat and poofy. “Are you a follower?”

“Only to make sure that the guy in front of me gets stabbed before me,” I replied, “so that I can be the one to stab the stabber. Simple meat shield tactics, really.” The mares just looked funnily at me. I sighed, shaking my head. “The evil thing in there is whispering sweet nothings into my ear and probably trying to seduce me.” I looked over my shoulder and yelled into the room, “Not until you at least buy me a very expensive dinner! What kind of slut do you take me for? I am a whore of caliber and class, thank you very much.”

Dust and Cards soon got spooked looks. Yep. It was doing that to it, too. Groaning, I said, “Fine, you jackoff. I’ll walk into your trap. Just stop trying to act all scary and mysterious. I’ve seen it all about a thousand times, and you’re very uncreative. Lighting Dust, take it off.”

“Wai-wha’?” the named mare stammered.

“The necklace. Not your… Hey, how long have you not been wearing that miniskirt-looking thing?” I asked. “You know, that weird little thing you had on when I first met you.”

“Uh, I took that off about immediately after you left the bar,” she replied, taking the chained Kruzifix off.

“Huh. I am really unobservant, then.” I accepted the necklace from her and put it in a pocket. The Eiserne Kreuz hanging from my neck was all I needed. With a roll of my eyes, I stepped into the trap and was surprised what I wasn’t immediately gelded. Gelding Jericho. Geldingcho. That would be my name if that happened. As the girls followed me in, I looked around. Still the same cathedral. Lame.

“Dust,” Cards said in a worried singsong-tone.

“Uh, yeah,” the pegasus replied.

“Do you see that?” And Cards pointed towards the altar that was so far, far away in the massive cathedral. There was nothing of interest there. “Because I really hope I’m not seeing it right about now.”

“If I lied and said no, would you feel better?” Dust asked.

“A little.”

“Then I don’t see anything.”

Cards glanced at me as I gave her a bemused look. “You know what? I was wrong. That didn’t make me feel better at all.”

“Does anyone have change for twenty Mark?” I called out suddenly. “Also, if somepony could tell me what the hell you two are seeing, that would also… help… oh, Scheiße.” I paused for a moment. “I don’t know what you two are seeing, but snap out of it—come on, let’s go. It’s just a stupid illusion. We’ll go back, figure out a way to dispel it, then come back and not have to deal with this pretentious monster. Sound good?”

“GB…” Dust whimpered in a weak tone, pointing at something over my shoulder like how a dying soldiers points at the mare he know’s has been sleeping with his wife and has left him thoroughly confused and horrified on many levels, “it’s not just an illusion.”

I rubbed my forehead. Why was there a vague ache in my head now? “One of two things are going to happen. I turn around it it’s there, leading to a few various possibilities. Or there’s nothing there and…” I looked down and saw a shadow growing across the floor, overlapping with my shadow. “You know,” I said slowly, “Devil’s Backbone, you’re supposed to let me finish and turn around first.”

A smile crept across my face, though. The Code was soon to be restored, or I would die. In either case, my problems would be solved. After all, I’ve been told it’s hard to have moral conundrums when your body was being eaten by worms.

A voice like creaking floorboards asked, “Are you a follower of the Mare Laurentia?”

Not the thing I was expecting him to say. But then, what did I expect him to say? Probably something to the effect of “Bend over and prepare thine anus” or maybe “I’m gonna teach you a thing or two about love!” Well, that second thing was something only I’d say as a battlecry. Of course, I was the only pony who cared for creative battle cries. I’ll take your “For the King!” and raise you my “Good for the Good God!”—thank you very much.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” I said, not turning around. “I am a follower of the Prophet’s word.” A grip on my sheathed sword, I gritted my teeth.

The voice—the so-called Devil’s Backbone, really—hummed a consideration. “It hangs from your neck, Crux Iericuntis.” He hesitated. “Yet you are no Jerichite. Why wear you the symbol of a fallen Imperii?”

I looked down at his shadow. If I knew my shadows, he was practically on top of me. Given that the way Dust and Cards were staring at something behind me, that wasn’t a bad presumption. “Too is it a symbol of my people, its distant descendants, in a way. Ours is a modified version of it, though. Non civis iericuntinus sum. Pretty sure I said that right. I don’t actually know, though I have a book about that language somewhere.”

“I,” he began, then paused. “I have been locked here for so many years in stasis. Everything I knew has changed but one thing: my devotion to her.” Another pause. By God, it was like he didn’t know that a period wasn’t one of those dot dot dot things. “I sense that you have brought me the object. Elkington has fulfilled his part of the pact. When you return to him, please give him my thanks. Let him know tha—”

“Yeah, I don’t care,” I replied, and spun around, swinging my sword. The fine steel slashed deep into the tower of black flesh behind me and hit a bone.

He shrieked a high-pitched squeal that sounded girlier than anything Cards could ever come up with as he jumped back. “Lucifer te perdat!” he howled, and I got a good look at his mouths, a set of four fleshy mandibles forming a pseudo-mouth around his more pony-like muzzle. With the horns on his otherwise bull-like head and the hooves ending his bipedal legs, I was pretty sure he was some sort of ex-minotaur. Being no better than dogs and ten times as ugly, though, demons had a lot of variety.

The Devil’s Backbone clutched at his bleeding side with two of his three pairs of arms. It was actually kind of funny because those two pairs of arms were actually really tiny and anemic. The illusion of the cathedral flickered and died, thank God. As it was, the room was actually some sort of large vault carved out of the rock itself. It was decorated with bits of archaeologic stuff—little dig sites and very nicely catalogued stuff. Where the altar had really been a rather pretentious throne of some sort, but at least the large room was still well-lit.

“See here,” I said, “you’re different than me and I don’t understand you, which means that I have to kill you, as is my custom. But more importantly, your death will satisfy the Code, will repair and fix it. And until you die horribly, I won’t be able to sleep at night.”

Eyes seeming afire with their own internal light, he shrieked, “Treacherous beast, just like the rest of your horrid kind! Never trust a pony, that’s the old maxim! Your kind have always lied and cheated ever since the dawn of time when you betrayed Our Lady!”

“Der Garten Eden?” I asked, puzzled.

To my utter stupefaction, the Devil’s Backbone dug a three-fingered hand from his big arms into the sword wound. I watched as he roared, grabbed, and clawed the hole in his char-like flesh. With a rasping, grunting sound like the world’s worst sexual session, he pulled his hand out. His hand came out clutching a rib bone. Before my very eyes, he grabbed the disembodied rib with his other hand and slid his fingers down in an an almost masturbatory motion. It was kind of fascinating to watch in a sort of “watching your parents do it” sort of way, and finding out just what kind of really freaky stuff your saintly mother was actually into.

“If Elkington instead sends assassins,” he said, gritting his teeth, his mandibles dancing, “then I know I was a fool to think you could trust a pony.” I mocked him by saying exactly what he just said but in a babyish tone. “But first, I’m going to kill you all,” he said Cimmerianly, his once bleeding wound rapidly drying up.

“Yeah, no,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.” He raised his rib up in the air—and what the hell? It was a spear. Was a rib, and now it was a bony spear. What kind of absurdly impractical yet evil and cool power was tearing out a rib and turning it into a spear?

He chucked it through the air with a weird flicking gesture. It flew past me with a sharp whoosh. I was just about to think of a jeer for missing me when I heard Cards scream. “Starting with her…” he growled, baring his yellowed teeth at me in a terrible smile.

Cards was just lying on the ground, a spear knee-deep into her side, into at least a lung. The armor hadn’t really done much for her. She gasped for breath through raspy heaves, a pool of blood forming beneath her as she shook. That’s when I saw something else, and then another one, and another, and another. There, on the higher parts of the wall, runic symbols painted in a charcoal-like substance. I recalled seeing these before, back in the city of Schiloh: explosive runes, a favored pastime of demons who felt artistically inclined.

Before I could even react, Dust was sliding to Cards’ side and pulling out a pink bottle. “Hold on, Cards! Oh shit, hold on!”—and she shoved the bottle into Cards’ mouth. I almost commanded her to stop. I didn’t know if the healing would cause the spear to fuse with the body, and I had momentarily forgotten that Equestrian healing potions were the wrong color, pink instead of the red they were in the Reich. Card weakly drank the bottle before just dropping her head on the stone floor.

“GB!” Dust shouted, and then a hoof clocked me in the chest. I almost lost the grip of my sword as I tumbled to the ground, pretty damn sure that there were tiny hairline fractures along my sternum now. “Oh Celestia, GB, Cards!”

The Devil’s Backbone leered at me with a grin. “Acta non verba,” he chuckled, reaching behind his back. “Actus me invito factus non est meus actus. Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.”

“Please just speak one language, Equestrian or Teutsch,” I replied. “I get confused easily by things.” The Backbone pulled out a sword that looked older than dirt. He wasted no time and pounced upon me, and I likewise wasted to time rolling to the side as his weapon stabbed the ground just where I had been. “Got you,” I said, and pulled out a knife—not the one that’d been inside me, for the record. Its edges were sharpened to the point of being downright invisible. All the better to stab someone in the thigh with.

Mister Spine screamed and flinched back, his own actions tearing the knife out for me. Good. The last thing you ever wanted to do if stabbed was to tear the weapon out. With a quick thought as I jumped to my hooves, I shouted, “Dust, whatever you do, don’t take the spear out of Cards—its the only thing keeping her alive!”

“I—uh—yeah!” Dust stammered.

A burning sensation beneath the flesh of my breast, another thought struck me as I glanced at Dust. Ten Mark say that those explosive runes only activate as the Backbone dies. “Dust, do you see those weird shapes drawn on the upper parts of the wall?”

“Uh-uh yeah!”

“Don’t ask any question, but I need you to fly up to them and smudge them!” I commanded. “Now, dammit, do it now, girl!” To her immense credit, she only took a single look back at Cards before nodding and flying up into the air.

“Memento mori!” the Backbone hissed, and I looked back just in the time to see a face that didn’t look too cheery bearing down upon me with a sword. He was too close for me to swing my sword or stab him before he got me first, so I did the one thing I could think of.

I twisted my neck forwards and gored him with my horn. Ignoring the spike of pain in my head, I could keep that part of my body between two of his ribs, and a trickle of dark blood running down it and onto my forehead and hat.

“You… you just…” Spiny McSpinerson muttered in what was hopefully horror.

“Well, why do you think unicorns have horns? They’re for goring! At least, so say evolutionary biologists who insist that unicorns’ natural psychokinetic powers are absurdly recent in our history as a thing: about fifty thousand years ago or so, which is also supposedly around the time when modern pony behavior emerged, too. Cool, huh?” He didn’t respond. “You know, if not for the fact that it’s the wrong part of me that’s inside you, this could almost be nice… No, wait, there is absolutely no way to phrase what I was just thinking in a way that doesn’t imply that I think it’d be a nice to rape you in the lung with my penis. And, you know, it’s saying a lot that doing that would actually be the least despicable thing I’ve done all day.”

“Oh Celestia, what the hell am I doing?” Dust screamed. “GB, how do I… the hell are you two doing?”

Before I could give a very snarky response, I felt my neck almost snap to the side as the Devil’s Backbone spun himself like a gater’s deathroll. It was so sudden, so hard, so fast, that it just blindsided me.

And then something cracked. Something was supposed to never, not in a million years, ever so much as bend the wrong way. The sudden sheer spike of agony in my head blinded me, literally made me blind as it gave me a thousand promises of pain yet to come.

Just like the rest of his body, his legs twisted in ways that should have powderized his bones. The hoof slammed into my eye at the same moment I flailed with my dagger. We both screamed like French whores, I in horror and agony, he in a mix a pain and childish giggling.

Landing on the ground with a roll, my vision unblurred enough to see everything but my peripheral vision clearly, the pain prancing gaily across my eyes. The first thing I saw clearly were the little Lightning Dusts flying around my head, and the tiny Cards hopping happily after the Dusts. Well, that’s a good sign. Hallucinations.

“Oh Celestia, GB!” Dust—the real one, hopefully—shouted as Cards moaned in pain beside my fallen body.

I realized I was panting hard, and I only realized it because I was coughing. It was a rough, hacking rasp, and each cough made it feel like fishbones stabbing my throat. The wound where the metal rod had pierced my lung only three days ago burned almost as wet and hot as my inflamed breast. It hadn’t bothered me when I killed Sleepy Oaks, so why… or maybe it had, and I was just incapable of noticing it.

Sleepy Oaks… my mind whispered. Repair the Code. I tried to stand, only to slip on what I hoped was blood and fall onto my back. As I laid on the floor, I saw the Devil’s Backbone, crawling on the ground as he clutched his bleeding wounds. Again, I tried to stand, only for Lightning Dust to skid to a halt next to me.

“Shit, hold on!” she told me, eyes widening as she looked from my face to my breast. Without another word, she grabbed for my chest, almost tearing my duster off she undid the top few buttons like a lover awkward in her eagerness. “Oh shit…” she whispered, eyes as wide as tarantulas.

“What?” I tried to lift my head to look at my burning chest, only for a trickle of salty blood to spill into an eyes. Instinctively, I clenched both eyes shut. Whether it was mine or the Backbone’s, I didn’t know. Gritting my teeth, I tried to rub my eyes, only for Dust to push my hooves away and wipe my eyes and forehead with something very soft and… her wing? Then she let me rub my eyes enough to open them. Yessir, there was a line of blood on her wingtip, and no small amount, too.

My eyes drifted to what she was staring at, what she had unbuttoned to see. There was this lovely hole in my breast where once there had been magically treated stitches. The wound that that daftly named mare had caused me when she pushed me off that balcony to save her beloved was bleeding anew, the stitches tore asunder. “Well. This seems a tad bit inconvenient,” I commented.

“You have healing potions, right? I used all the ones you gave me on Cards!”

I shook my head. “Yes, but they’re useless.”

“What! Why?!” she demanded, her eyes constantly flickering between the Backbone and me.

“Because there’s no food in my system. I vomited it all out in Sleepy Oaks after you left. And without food in your system, the potion will break down healthy parts of your body in order to repair the wounded parts.” I forced a smile. “I actually needed to stop and brush my teeth to get the taste out of my maw. If you give me a healing potion, I will die.”

“B-but you’ll die without one!”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t that be just grand for the Code?” I replied with a little chuckle. I took a deep breath and tried to mediate upon my father’s face. His eyes were as cold and mighty as glaciers. With the face of my father in my mind, I gritted my teeth and willed myself to stand. The headache made it nearly impossible to think, my seeping chest made it a bad idea, and the Backbone’s lumbering towards me made it my only option. “How many runes did you destroy?”

“I-I dunno,” Dust blurted. “How do I destroy them?”

“Rub them, really,” I said. “They’re known to become useless during even the lightest of drizzles, snowstorms, during strong winds, in places that are moist, when threatened, and when exposed to corn-products. They’re pretty worthless, usually. In here, though, they’re useful to him.” I coughed. “Just smear that weird paste they’re made off.” With a strong thought, I telekinetically picked up my sword. The act felt as if it tore my head in two, and a fresh splash of wetness dripped down my forehead. “Destroy the runes, Dust,” I ordered in a steely tone.

“But—”

“Yes, ours are lovely, but I really couldn’t care less. Destroy the runes, or we all die.” I shot her a look so acidic that she actually stepped back. For a second, I almost thought she were seeing who I really was at the moment without the Kodex. “Are we clear?”

She swallowed. “Crystal.”

I didn’t bother looking at her as she flew off. And I tried to ignore Cards’ agonized groan as she just laid there, not bleeding, but not getting any better. I had to fix the shattered Kodex. That filly’s dusty eyes. I could feel them still looking at me, could feel the Code being torn asunder, could feel a monster stirring under my flesh. And there was only one way to deal with a monster.

My knife was back in its holster, and my sword was ready. Every second felt like an eon as I stared at the Devil’s Backbone. My lips tightened so hard they became less like lips and more like some incredibly unsightly but small scar from a hernia operation. Father’s face. Dusty eyes. Cards dying on the ground so uselessly. The Kodex.

Trying not to stumble or cough, I swung my weapon as the Backbone neared me. He avoided the blow, his wounds bleeding harder. With a knife of his own, he found purchase in my shoulder, the blade utterly useless against the duster’s fabric. It was not a proud, heroic slash that nearly castrated the naked savage, but the awkward jerk of a stallion who should in no way even be standing up, let alone killing a monster. The kind of slash made by an old cripple with delusions of grandeur and one having a beard made out of kittens.

Even with the spot above his groin bleeding, he wasted no time in nearly caving my skull in with a single ferocious kick that nailed the spot between forehead and horn. At least I could take comfort in the fact that he had a very tiny penis. Thank you, prehistoric mares who made conscious decisions to breed only with the best hung guy, thus passing their Gene along to all modern stallions. The confidence boost was really something I needed.

I shook the blood from my eyes like a wet dog shakes off being covered in all that piss. That’s when I felt the Backbone’s three-fingered hand wrapping around my horn. He smiled at me with his inner muzzle, his mandibles extended outwards as if to hug me warmly, and he threw my head against the stone floor. I tried to shake it off, tried to remember my father’s face, but the Devil’s Backbone was faster as he grabbed me by the back of the head.

“I am named Spina Diaboli,” he whispered to me. “Believ’st thou in a higher power?”

“I am a Konfessionist,” I groaned, “as are most every single one of my countrymen. And I know then an angel watches over me, and they say that two fallen angels rule Equestria. You are an animal, a race unfit to worship, unfit even to know the art of language.”

“Ah, a Konfessionist. What an ancient faith,” he said contemplatively. “And know’st thou how I learned the modern Equestrian language?” My lips remained sealed. “A demon can learn any language he chooses. All he need do is cut out the tongue of a living speaker of that language and consume it. Confiteor, it is just that Confessionismus is a dog’s cult; noble creatures such as my kindred will never so much as speak around one of your faith, lest they hear our holy language, one which your vulgar faith has already so thoroughly raped. But for thee, I shall this exception make, because I know that my higher power, Domina Nostra, Our Lady, would not fault me for it, just this once, thou worthy foe.”

“You know, I must ask,” I said: “what’s with all these bad guys I’ve been meeting recently being so obsessed with females and willing to monologue about them? First Elkington and his obsession with Celestia, and then you and your Lady. I get it, you all need to get laid, but there is such a thing as touching yourself, so don’t take that sexual frustration out on—” Before I could even finish, he slammed my face into the floor. My horn felt as if it was going to be torn out by the root as it and the rest of my head tried to go in separate directions. He raised my raise and slammed it again.

Raising it a third time, blood pouring from a gash on my forehead, he allowed me to look into his smile, his blue eyes. The Backbone opened his mouth to speak, only to howl in my face, dropping me as he flailed backwards. I blinked when I saw the reason.

Cards, panting and rasping hard, was standing there, blood running down her flimsy armor. The little mare dropped her bloody-to-the-hilt sword—the same sword I’d given her—to the ground. “He’s mine, you fucking fuck,” she hissed before collapsing to the ground, landing on her good side.

The Backbone roared as he dug a hand into the deep wound in his chest. “Puella, morieris!” Apparently, he could rip out ribs and also turn them into swords. Fantastic. It had to be the single most impractical evil power to ever have. With the boneblade in his bloody hands, he charged at Cards.

For your father’s sake, boy! a voice hissed into my ear. I didn’t have a choice, it was pure muscle and instinct acting on their own. If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done any different. “Cards!” I shouted, throwing my tattered body forwards on legs that shouldn’t have been working. I tackled the Devil’s Backbone just as he swung. He smiled as his sword stabbed into my flesh from where Dust had opened my duster and I’d neglected to close it, because I was an idiot.

But I smiled and knowingly forced my body closer to him, the act plunging his sword deeper and deeper into my body. “Hello,” I croaked, “can I interest you in this lovely collection of knives?”—and I pulled my knife out and stabbed him and stabbed him and stabbed him like it was going out of season. Why that comparison made any sense to me at that moment was mostly because there was a sword deep in my body. You don’t tend to think very well in those moments.

As I grabbed onto his sword, I felt his spidery fingers sliding into my coat. With a mad smile, the bleeding beast pulled out the Kruzifix and rolled backwards. He held onto the Kruzifix as if it were the most beautiful girl in his world. Since I was pretty sure that there wasn’t really anything notable about the Kruzifix other than its unnecessary symbolism, I figured that the Kruzifix was probably a Mistress who he’d later found out is a Mister, and no amount of showering would ever cleanse him of the shame. Not that there’d be a later for him, he was bleeding from the multifarious wounds all over his body. And I was no better off.

I looked at Cards, who stared up at with me wide, teary eyes. “Good to see you’re alive, Cards,” I chuckled and coughed.

“You… you took a sword for me,” she replied in a dumb, hoarse tone. I could see that she had torn the spear in her body from moving. But like a clingy girlfriend, the real challenge was getting the spear out of her; that was where the real damage would come from, and I didn’t think she’d eaten enough to possibly allott for healing potions to fix all of that. It was safer to leave her as-is than to try to fix her.

With a dismissive wave, I said, “Hey, for you? Anytime, Cards. I’d offer you my business card, but because of your name, I feel as if that would descend into the realm of confusion and bad puns. Also, I don’t have business cards, so there’s that, too.” I looked over to see the Backbone hilariously crawling across the floor towards the throne that had been the cathedral’s altar during the illusion. Then I peered at the bony sword in my chest. Well. That could pretty much ruin my day.

With a throaty gurgle trying to pass itself off as a groan, I opened my bags and hunted for something. Oh, wait. I pulled out a half-dead but still feisty ocelot bound with string. “Oh yeah, I stole Elkington’s pet cat.” In a single motion, I tossed the kitty aside and cuts its bindings. The ocelot squealed and ran off somewhere. “What a nice guy. He’s going to die out in the wild and it’s going to be great.” Back to my bag, I pulled out what I was looking for: two slices of French silk pie, the remains of my masterpiece. I wiped the blood from my forehead before wolfing them down so hard that I hiccuped. As I pulled out two bottles of Equestrian healing potions, I said to myself, “Oh, this is going to hurt.”

I tore the sword out of my body in a single jerk. Before the blood exploded outwards, I threw myself onto my back and dumped the healing potions directly into the wound. “Mary’s little lamb was a goddamn slut!” I half-screamed, half-singsonged. “Ow! Bends hooker prostitute wench slut of holies with a side of ranch dressing, oh God it burns!”

It was over soon, and I felt an empty hole in my gut. The sword wound was mostly healed; all it was now was just a nasty gash. Blood didn’t gush from the wound; it slowly, slowly wept from it. Funny. I expected more healing. But as for the rest of my wounds, they were still proudly alive, but at least I’d prolonged my death for—something exploded, somepony shrieked, and somepony thudded against the ground screaming. Great. Not even a second to get my thoughts in order.

Before I even saw what was wrong I was sprinting at full speed to the screeching, bleeding mass of opal-colored fur and feathers on the ground. Just as I was cogitating what must have happened to her, I slid down onto the ground next to her. “Lightning Dust, what hurts?” I demanded of her, but I already knew what hurt. Everything from her breast up to her face was pockmarked with shrapnel, her face bleeding like a blood fountain. Parts of her seemed like without the muscles holding them on, they would fall off. Her eyelids, miraculously, seemed like the most intact things left on her face.

“Everything!” she wailed, blood mixing with tears. “It did a thing, and then I covered my eyes with my wing, and then it blew up, and then I crashed! I think it’s broken!” I looked her over. Sure enough, her right wing was torn up worse than a nice couch was bound to become when introduced to the new kitty, and the limb bent at a rather unnatural angle. “Food in belly,” she blurted out, and I nodded. The meaning was clear enough.

Suppressing a coughing fit, I pulled out a potion and, like a mother to her baby, nursed the bottle into her mouth. She drank greedily. I looked at her face only as long as to confirm that the potions were working, averting my eyes when her flesh began to crawl and repair itself. Then I saw that not only was the wing bloodied and snapped, it also didn’t looked attached properly at all.

“Lightning Dust,” I said, and she look up at me with quivering lips, the torn flesh under her countenance dancing as it healed. “I’m going to do something to you, and you’re going to have to trust me. Can you do that? Can you trust me?” She nodded weakly, and I flipped her onto her stomach. “Stay still, you dislocated your wing.” Dust only made a weak, whimpering sound as I physically grabbed onto her wings. “Now, on the count of—” I twisted and bent and pushed the broken limb, and she screamed in such a high-pitched voice that I struggled to believe it was her and not the Devil’s Backbone.

“Scheiße,” I muttered at the relocated limb. “You wing’s still broken. It’s going to need a splint, and fast, or else you might…” I didn’t finish the sentence. Even I had the common sense to try not to put that thought into her head. There was nothing to build a quick and dirty splint out of.

The Devil’s Backbone laughed maniacally. “Inferior, stupid creatures, you ponies! Today, the good guys win, and the path to your extermination is found by the righteous.”

I looked over at the Backbone fumbling with the Kruzifix just as Cards growled out a low, “Go fuck yourself.” Then she sputtered out into coughs, even choking up a splotch of blood, the spear jerking around with every cough, no doubt slicing up fresh internal wounds

Even from across the room, the demon trying to stand up, I could see his smile. “Why not? Give me a chunk of broken glass and I’ll rip it right off and stick it right in, for all the good it’s doing me these days. And then I can use it on you—to teach you a lesson in being weak.” He let out a howling, mad cackle. “And then the pegasus, and finally to the stallion there! I’ll let you all have it! And it’ll be no one’s fault but your own. After all, if you were strong, you would have fought me off.”

Father’s face flashed across my mind as I stood up from Dust. There was nothing to do about her with that bastard still alive. Every breath he took just made me want to strangle an orphanage. The fact that this thought even crossed my mind was proof that he needed to die. The Code demanded nothing less than a blood sacrifice. What this bastard didn’t realize was that when dealing with me, it was better to just leave bad enough alone

So I sauntered towards him, sword at the ready. I ignored the blood still leaking from my body; the sick, burning feeling running throughout my chest; and the searing headache that made it feel as if a part of my head was about to be torn off, mostly because a very morbid part of me was sure it was only hanging on by the barest of roots.

That was when the Devil’s Backbone smiled like an overeager lover, performed a gesture with the Kruzifix that felt obscene, spoke unheard words that I somehow felt in the core of my bones, and plunged the object into one of the many bleeding wounds he had to choose from.

“Te voco!” he shouted, tearing the bloody Kruzifix out of his chest and holding it high in the air. The Kruzifix suddenly spat forth a shimmer of black sparks, an arc of silent lightning racing from its points. The Backbone howled with laughed, screaming in an unnervingly orgasmic delight.

A shadowy but starry nebula emerged from the object. It washed over him as if drinking him in, or, I thought, like how a boar tried on bowling shoes. The stars within it seemed to twinkle in its darkness as the nebula separated itself from the Backbone. At first, it was like a mold, like it was trying to emulate the Backbone’s bodyshape. Then the nebula undulated like a lover who has no idea how this position was supposed to be performed, but insisted that she wasn’t a virgin but was a total pro boss at sex.

In the next instant, the nebulous cloud only bore vague semblance to the Backbone. Then, like a hamster on anabolic steroids, it grew. Still keeping that minotaur-like body structure, the cloud was nearly the Backbone’s size and a half. It looked plainer, though, no horns, only two arms with five fingers, and no whacky mandibles. The nebula seemed as if to harden as the twinkling stars all suddenly died.

With a sudden jerk, the figure’s arm struck forward and grabbed the Backbone’s tongue. It ripped the tongue out in a single, almost effortless gesture before shoving it into its cloudy mouth. Beady white eyes flicked open upon the hardening cloud, and they stared at the screaming demon.

“I have hunger,” a voice declared in dark tones that sent a chill up an down my spine, and also gave me the strangest craving for a strawberry-banana smoothie. I could see the cloud solidifying into naked flesh covered in strange black runes. With a single, precise motion, it jabbed its clawed fingers into the Backbone’s breast and tore out a chunk of flesh. It—he, really, judging by the voice—wolfed the flesh down. Then, with a smile, I watched him tear out chunk after chunk of flesh as the Devil’s Backbone shrieked in horror, even as the Backbone pissed himself.

One of the runes exploded as the nebulous horror broke apart the Backbone’s spine, sucked the marrow out, and then masticated and swallowed the entire backbone. Cracks spread along the wall and ceiling from the explosion’s epicenter, but with the sight before me, I could hardly care.

And then the Devil’s Backbone was nothing more than a gory pile of shit-filled intestines on the ground and smears of blood along the nebulous creature. The thing made a weird cat-like purr of satisfaction before turning his beady eyes to me and offering a smile thrice bigger than its head should have allowed for. It was so big that it exposed even his bloodstained white molars to the light. He bent down and picked one of the few things he hadn’t eaten, the Backbone’s jaw. Curling his spindly yet meaty fingers around it, he took a step towards me, and I took a step back.

The undulating mass of black nebula suddenly infused itself again with stars as crimson hues mixed with the black in a way that reminded me of a chocolate-swirl milkshake. Smile dying, he sniffed at the air with a nose that looked more like a cancerous sharkfin than a nose. And as I came to notice the Kruzifix dangling from his neck and resting comfortably on his chest, I also came to notice that it wasn’t that his smile was dying, his lips were literally sowing themselves shut from the edges in. His mouth issued two audible clicks as I saw teeth in his maw shifting position as if being carried by a million fleshy ants.

When finally his mouth looked to only be as big as it should have been on his head, he smiled again. “Long days and pleasant nights to thee.” His old voice was like a hooffull of burning smoothstone locked in a deep crevasse. When I didn’t reply, he frowned. “The tongue feels wrong in my mouth. Mine ears say it is spoken right, but it is… uncomfortable.” He eyes flicked to Cards and Dust. “Three of you. Sexual dimorphism. Two female, one male. Thy harem?”

“I-I—no,” I stammered. “Those are not a, uh, feature of my culture.” A rune exploded somewhere, not that I paid any attention at all to it. There was something about this thing that made it impossible to take my eyes off.

The thing stared at me and gave an almost audible click from the back of his throat. “Culture,” he said as if tasting the word. “The mares are thy zhah-rey?”

“Zhah-rey?” Sounds French, almost. Even the R was a gutturally trilled R.

He paused. “It is not a word that you have. Zhah… would be… Zhah is the physical yet nigh imperceptible representation of the chains that bind: the all-powerful force that guides the course of all, the omnipotent force that holds together all of the worlds not destroyed in the war between the Elder Gods.” He scrunched his face. “My forefathers told me that the Elder Gods were destroyed when the One True God awoke from its billions-of-years-long slumber to lead my tribe against those who has strayed from the One True God’s path. Still other forefathers have said the Elder Gods were not deities of evil but rather were stray, greedy lambs from the same flock as my tribe is descended from, that they were our lost tribes. The truth was lost to time eons ago. In any case, I suppose you could call zhah ‘fate’, but that is inadequate.” He shook his head. “A zhah-rey is a group brought together by the zhah.”

The thing took a step forward, then froze. He looked around as if being naked in front of a school classroom. In fact, he was naked, but only I was really staring at him. With a grimace of his face, he looked at us ponies. “The little one is dying. The bigger one is dying. Thou art dying. Bloodloss.” Another rune exploded, and a chunk of ceiling came crashing down. “Too many have died in this place over the millennia. I can feel their spirits. They do not know they are dead. They are watching us. This is a dark place. I do not like how they stare at me.”

More runes exploded. The very earth shook as pieces of wall and ceiling tumbled to the ground, kicking up clouds of limestone-smelling dust that I was pretty sure were hazardous to breathe. Twenty years later and it’d probably give me lung cancer. Today just couldn’t get any better, could it? He strode forwards with a strange sort of swagger, his hands balled and his arms swaying. As the top of his head became fully solid, I saw that the top of his head was a smooth layer of skin decorated with those same black runes as on his arms. I took step back. He wasn’t even so much as jogging, but his each stride took him absurdly far.

“The sin of damnation is near,” he said. “Allow me to help your Zhah-rey.”

“Are you a demon?” I blurted out.

He tilted his head at me. His feet materialized, and I saw they were not feet of any that I could recognize. They were each like four-pronged stilts stabbing at the ground like fleshy talons, and from each ankle extended smaller, metallic spidery legs in a circular formation. Rather like the world’s worst pom-poms, really. “Demon? No. I am a… the guardian of something long dead. In my day, they ingrained my name into my flesh so that I never forget who I was and am. I am simply named C.” The little spidery legs around his feet retracted into his flesh. “But in the days of yore, they called me a… Skendwalkarijaz.” C frowned. “It means—” a pause “—it means skinwalker, one who walks in the skins of others.”

He strolled up to Cards. The mare only whimpered weakly as he scooped her up in this nebulous arms. She tried to struggle, but there was no fight left in the mare. “This one is the most dead,” C stated. “I will help her. She is of good heart.” More of the caves shook and tremored. “We have at most two minutes before we meet Zhomala-cum-zhah.” He paused. “Meet the bad harvest song.” He paused. “Meet death, that is.”

“Why are you helping?” I asked, stumbling towards him. It wasn’t a question I could hold back.

The skinwalker looked at me. “As the last of the skinwalker’s line, it is my holy duty,” he said cooly. “All hail to the skinwalker: praise to the Skahlzhinh and the King.” C slid his fingers to Cards’ head and rubbed her ear. “Maid of sorrow, your times fades by—my world moved on eons ago, but I will not let you or your world fade just yet.” He shifted Cards, carrying her now just under one arm. With his free hand, C performed a strange gesture, holding the hand up, twisting one finger tend and holding the others . Then he strode over to Lightning Dust, who was only barely hanging on to consciousness. “I suspect that I could carry her, too. Or I could carry the male. Not the both. I do not believe that without my help you will survive.”

A single dreadful thought overtook me. The Devil’s Backbone was dead, and I was not the one who killed him. That meant one thing and one thing only: the Kodex would remain unrepaired. The only way to deal with a monster is to kill it. I bit my lip. Heroes never die, right? Right.

“Help her,” I said to him in a flat voice.

“GB,” Dust groaned, reaching a hoof out to me as C picked her up.

“GB? This is his name?” C asked the pegasus.

“No, my name is Jericho,” I replied.

Dust blinked hard. “Wait, what?!”

“Yeah, my name is Jericho.”

From under C’s arm, Dust looked at me as if I’d just betrayed her. “But I… Why didn’t you ever tell me!?”

I shrugged. “You never asked.”

C affixed me a hard look. “Well then, Jericho-tsaius, I have something to tell thee: The end of the road lies, straight ahead it lies. For done is done. From here shall there be no turning back. All journeys must to an end come.” With a deep, rumbling roar that nearly blew apart my eardrums in the enclosed but large room, something exploded. Chunks of walls were coming down, ceiling falling, ground trembling. “Catchst thou my meaning, Jericho-tsaius?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Hmm…” he hummed. “Long days and pleasant nights to thee, then, Jericho-tsaius. But with an abomination such as I now awakened, I can now discern one thing for certain: the march of time is now begun.” He dropped the jawbone of the Devil’s Backbone at my hooves.

I blinked and he was gone. Just gone, like he was never there in the first place. I blinked again and my nose was bleeding, my head pounding. In the next moment I was screaming, clutching my head as my nose, ears, and forehead bled. Gritting my teeth, I willed myself to stop screaming. Where was I? Lying on the ground? Scheiße! I struggled to stand back up, the pain throbbing and smashing and aching and stabbing and drilling all across my head and the wounds on my torso.

Looking down, I saw what looked like a spent rune. God’s blood, they were everywhere, and they couldn’t have been here a second ago! Why didn’t I have the foresight to bring corn products? I looked up and did not see Cards, did not see Lightning Dust, did not witness C. In fact, aside from all the blood, the only evidence that others had been in here with me was the pile of intestines over by the throne.

Had… had there even been a C? a thought asked. Had I even brought Cards and Dust down here with me? Or had I… had I killed them like I killed Sleepy Oaks, and simply don’t remember? What if without the Code I actually decided why not damn myself even further, and because there were girls I... Then I swallowed and looked down. No! It had happened, and the girls are fine! I willingly chose to save them over myself—the Code is not satisfied, but there is tape over the break.

As I wiped the blood from my forehead and tried to ignore the feeling of something only barely being attached to my head, I looked up at the ceiling. “Oh. I don’t know what kind of rune you are, but judging by how you’re all broken from the exploding ceiling, and how there’s all sorts of explosives spell runes all over the floor here, ten Mark say that that rune was designed to magically hide the other runes or something. Because the Devil’s Backbone was both a flamboyant schemer and a want-to-be painter.”

I looked down and grabbed the jawbone off the floor. Stashing it in my bag, I looked at the doorway leading to the elevator. My legs did what I had no time to think about as more runes ignited into fiery explosions. I felt metal and stone shrapnel claw at my cheeks, most of them brushed aside from. God, how did I even have this much blood to lose? This was getting ridiculous. I should open a one-stallion blood bank.

My lungs heaved in dusty air, and I had to fight to hold back a coughing fit. Into the dark tunnel I went as the large room collapsed. It was like the end of the world behind me, the cataclysmic crash of a million tons of stone, the fire and roar of explosions, the feeling of a thousand secrets forever lost in that ruble.. Somewhere far beyond in the darkness were the double doors, and the only reason I couldn’t see them was because they’d been closed. By what, I didn’t know, but it was a mystery I didn’t care to solve.

And here were the doors at last. I put a hoof on them to open them. They opened alright. I was halfway through the barely opened doors and looking at the stone bridge and—my world ended. A wave of fire and pressure tore me apart, nearly limb from limb as I was thrown onto the ground. It took me a moment to register the pain, to realize that there had even been an explosive rune on the door, and that I was missing my left eye.

No, scratch that. I missing part of my left eye, enough to kill my vision. In the light of the glowing crystals, I could see a small piece of my eye resting on my duster, and feel liquid weeping from my torn eye. And as I tried to lift my head, I saw the eyeball simply fall out of my eye, just like that meatball in that old child’s song about the meatball that got sneezed off its plate and ended up as a drug-dealer. For a second, I was staring into my own eye. It bounced around, held in place by sole virtue of being attached to its flesh stalk. But then it made contact with something else hanging onto my face by mere tendrils of perforated flesh. It was a hard, pointy object with a vaguely sharp end.

My heart did not beat for what felt like a full moment. Thinking hard against the murderous agony in my skull, I tried to levitate the eyeball back. The little thing dangling from my hornhead sparkled, then, with a wet schlop, the horn fell off. No new wave of pain, no explosion of fear, I just watched it fall off, bounce off my eyeball, and merrily roll off as if there was candy over there.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s bad.” With an almost dreamlike slowness unbefitting the collapsing underground, I raised a hoof and felt at the base of my horn. There was just a weird bony mark there. “The antithesis of good, in fact.” I manually picked up my eyeball, opened my eyelid as wide as I could, and pushed it back into my skull. I snapped the eyelid shut as hard as I could and never stopped holding it hard. “I’m an earth pony now. Jetzt bin ich ein Erdling.”

And then somehow I was standing up. I don’t know how I got there. It was probably gnomes, the same ones that’d stared at me menacingly like from the front lawn of my across-the-street neighbor back when I was a colt. Nothing hurt any longer. That meant I was in shock, that my organs were shutting down and I was about to die. Neat.

In the next second, I had my own bloody horn in my teeth. It tasted like copper, just like blood. Or like that one time I thought it’d be a good idea to put a bunch of coins in my mouth. Oh, hey, look. It was the ocelot, running around all terrified. I tried to greet it, but I couldn’t speak with a detached part of my body in my mouth. I almost thought Ugh, this can’t possibly get any worse, but then I also thought that this would’ve been tempting fate—and then a giant stalagmite… stalactite… a giant stalag fell from the roof of the cave and smashed into the stone bridge leading to the elevator, destroying the bridge utterly.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” I tried to yell. “You can’t do that; I was just saying it as an example!” Of course, it probably came out as a muffled series of grunts, but it sounded pretty coherent to me. So then. That limited my options. There was no way I could jump that, and the river’s current looked too strong to safely swim across. And with no horn, I wasn’t going to levitate myself across the gap. Not that any unicorn I ever met or knew could even do that. Well, maybe Jan Sobieski, a Bibliothekar—a unicorn trained by the Reich from childhood to wield their psychic powers for the Reich. Because magic was dangerous. Psychic powers were A-okay.

No! a voice in my head bellowed. Stay focused, or have you forgotten the face of your father?! Then another voice, a distant memory said, Make every swing of the sword count! For the sake of the mothers who bore you and the faces of the fathers who smiled upon you! Father’s cold eyes flashed through my head. The Mann seemed to take a special joy in utterly lacking any emotions, whether out of cold contempt for me or if that was really who he was, I never knew.

In a moment of thought, I put my destroyed horn into a pocket. “Perhaps I am just a madpony—ein Irrer—who’s dreamt of being sane for far too long.” Then, stepping forwards as rocks fell into the river with titanic splashes that deafened me, I whispered, “Pleasant dreams die; unpleasant ones live forever.”

So I laughed hard as reality slowly trickled back into my mind. As a pillar holding up this station-like place buckled and collapsed in a spray of dust and rock, I laughed. It was hilarious—I was now an earther because my horn had been blown off; my eye had been perforated and was now only kept in my skull because I was clenching the eye shut so hard, and it was probably going to get infected and it’d need to be cut out; there was a panicking ocelot running around as demonic runes blew this ancient underground straight to hell without any care for the millions of years it must have taken the water to carve this cave out; and now the only way out of this place was gone! It was the epitome of humor.

Laughter was like a hurricane: when it got strong enough, it became self-feeding, self-supporting. You didn’t laugh because the jokes was funny, but rather because your very own condition was just hysterical. The storm got even stronger when the only choices you even had anymore were either to laugh or to cry. I was going to die cold and alone in a dark cave no one would ever find again, coughing as I laughed and bleeding to death from several wounds, and for what? Nothing. That was what. And that was just the funniest thing I’d ever thought of.

But every storm has its eye, the place where it is utterly calm and orderly, and that place was the center of my mind. My body laughed, struggled to even stand from uncontrollable fits of laughing and coughing. With all of my willpower, I sauntered forwards, up onto the ruined bridge. I walked into something, and I almost opened my left eye. Angling my head to look at it, I saw it was fallen block of stone from somewhere. Right then. Missing an eye. Still had to get used to that. Back to walking the bridge

I smiled at I reached the edge of the broken bridge and stared into the rushing rapids below. It was the first honest smile I’d had in hours, and it was better than any orgasm. If I was going to die, I’d be damned if I’d let it be from something as stupid as a random series of traps painted by a demon who failed art class while I was on a quest from some idiotic Duke with a fetish for his Princess.

So I did the only rational thing.

I jumped into the rushing currents of the icy underground river and let myself be swept under the current and into the darkness. Because fuck you, Duke Elkington, Princess Celestia, the Devil’s Backbone, Father, and my third-grade math teacher. It was a good thing that committing a heroic sacrifice like I had was a temporary guarantee from God that you’d survive the unsurvivable. Right? Right?

Oh dear God, I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Author's Note:

Footnote: Level Up.
New Perk: Fatty Fat Fat Fat Fat — You are a fat pony and no one likes you. On the plus side, you now gain more health from fatty foods, like French Silk Pie. This means that with food in your stomach, healing potions work extra hard and heal for even more! Of course, it also means you’ll die of high blood pressure in about thirty years, but whatever. It doesn’t matter that you’re actually pretty svelte, I’ll still call you fat now that you have this perk. You fat bastard.

Companion Perk Lost: Dealt Her Hand, Cards
Companion Perk Lost: Dust to Dust, Lightning Dust

End of Act 1 — That Government Boy

To be continued in:

Act 2 — Thy Flesh Consumed

Comments

[TheLordSiffer]

Dear Readers

Despite what Jericho says in this chapter, the old earth pony stallion is in fact, Jericho's father. You see, the story of Jericho's birth is a tragic yet miraculous telling of fate and destiny.

It all started when Jericho's father was making his way on a road, the sun was shining and trade could be smelled in the air when suddenly—a mare next to him collapsed, screaming and moaning. JeriDad immediately sprang to the fore, and transported her to the hospital, where an amazing discovery was made—the mare was pregnant, having collapsed from the sheer force of hours of really, really good sex being compressed into half a second, she had become the subject of an immaculate conception. And who was the father? Why, JeriDad, of course. As it turns out, his pure manliness had sought out the most fitting mate for his future, awesome offspring, and it had found the necessary potential in her.

Now, the years passed, and Jericho was born, being brought up by his loving parents, whom had now forged deep bonds of love. But it was not to be. When Jericho was young, but a mere few years old, his mother was caught in a severe bee-accident, and died due to an incapacity to react properly to the situation. You see, dear reader, JeriDad and JeriMom had a very, very healthy physical relationship, and JeriDad's manliness made him capable of pleasing any mare—leading to a love-life so vigorous that JeriMom was often stuck in a fatigued-yet-blissful state of mind, and sometimes had problems standing. Realizing that his mother had died because of the incredible sexual potential that lay within his genes, Jericho became alienated from sex, and swore never to take a lover, lest she die like his mother had. In his quest for celibacy, he sought out Tabletop RPGs, comicbooks and finally, he joined the army, hoping that the physical exertion would tire him out too much to feel any lust.

And so, ends one chapter of Jericho's tragic past.

[terrycloth]

Oops! It looks like you accidentally posted the next chapter of Project Horizons to this story instead...

Just kidding. It wasn't nearly long enough.

[The dead Pixel Brony]

I bounced in my hair, giggled madly, and clapped my hands together when I saw that this had updated.

[appelpieman]

Ah, Jericho. The only story where i have absolutely no idea what is going on, has happened or what everything means. Still doesn't stop me loving it with a passion bordering on hatred though.

[Jojo Salatcia]

3150715
Aye, well I'm the Sexy Quasi One. So... yeah. Suck on that shit.

[BoogaBingBangBow]

Did... Did he died?

[hambone1]

so....jericho is missing an eye and a horn, dying from blood loss, and jumped down an icy underground river while dust and cards are transported somewhere else by some centaur like creature after fighting a multiple armed demon? Talk about a cliffhanger. What happens next I have no possible idea

[that1dude]

Holy shit, that was intense. An awesome fight scene, an ancient guardian, some horrible disfigurement, and a party separation. Plenty of shit went down this chapter. I wonder how you'll follow it up?

[inDerpxar]

He... might be okay.

Well, no. Probably not now.

[ZephyrStrife]

I... have no true description for how mind-blowingly awesome this journey has been.

[Jojo Salatcia]

3153174
Well, sit back, grab a snack, and make an appointment with your nearby "the rapist", because Team Jericho promises that you ain't seen nothing yet.

[NaughtSought]

What a day to go through the entire story. and to finish at the act end as well!

[Dragonburn98]

Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned Jericho has two scars on his reasonably sized shlong.

Pointlessly,
JerichoCardsShipper69

[phlamingsoul]

This is a masterpiece of literature, and now I shall put a 9x19 mm Walther P99 flush to my head and put the trigger. For old times sake.

[Jason Brony]

Best story I have ever read! 23 out of 10!

...More.

[Luminous Lead]

Friendly skinwalker? That's new!

[Crusading Cutie]

Well......I can honestly say that I wasn't expecting that. Any of it. I mean, I was expecting the whole 'guilty about being a mass murderer' thing, but the rest was a shock!

[monkeyXtypewriter]

Well then... the deification has most certainly met oscillation, now hasn't it hmm?

[TheLordSiffer]

3153594
Jericho: Teaching you the important things in life!
For the record, I ship Jericho with Cards, S and L,
I ship Cards with Jericho and L.. and S, because no doubt only S and L can give Cards the compassion she needs.
And I ship C with nobody, because he can go fuck himself. Possibly literally.

3154143
Dat it? That's all you're gonna say? Don't you know Crushric can't get a boner without your long and hard comments?

3154293
I'm not certain what you said, or why you said it, but you sound intelligent saying it, and that's the sort of thing we appreciate here in the Jericho Team!

[ChaosSapphire]

O yes....

UHHHhhhhhhhh

O dear god yes....

That fight scene

Me Gusta

UUUUHHhhhhhh

[monkeyXtypewriter]

3154444 Glad to be aboard, herr Capitan! great to be here!

[MessoriaAQ]

Nooo! Oh God, no! What hast thou done to Cards! Damn, and now we won't ever see them again.

Cards probably has some creepy fetish for being spanked. Just because physical pain was the only thing that could make her feel anymore.

“Why didn’t you ship off on the boat onto the lake? You must have been just sitting here for, like, an hour.” Neither of them answered or even looked me in the eye, Dust, in fact, just sort of rocked on her hooves.

Know'st thou, I can come up with serveral things that could've happened in that hour.

In a moment of thought, I put my destroyed horn into a pocket. “Perhaps I am just a madpony—ein Irre—who’s dreamt of being sane for far too long.”

Ich glaube eher, dass er ein Irrer ist.

[Kreth]

First of all. Damn, what an epic chapter. I truly enjoyed it. I loved Jericho's slip into his own dark mind at the thought of his Code being broken. I wonder what new darks things Jericho will do now that his code is broken and has yet to be repaired. Crushric you keep making me love this terribly mad pony more and more. As I have said in the past his characterization is phenomenal. Now we have this 'Skinwalker' roaming about, Cards and LD are MIA, possibly dead at Jericho's hooves, and Jericho is dying. So what will happen in Thy Flesh Consumed? I can't wait to see what you have planned for EQ's northern neighbors.

Second: Siffer you're bat shit crazy, but we already knew this and I so this for no one's benefit but yours. Because you undoubtedly feed off of being called nutters. And stop shipping things. It's not healthy, or something.

[Dick McKickEm]

Ahh, there are the Dark Tower refrences you mentioned. Though, you probably would have gotten away with using Ka instead of your own word. Honestly, I'm probably one if your few readers who has read at least some DT.

Also, will Dust start calling him Jerry now that she knows his real name? It sounds like the Dust thing to do.

[Scarves]

Whoa, this is pretty awesome!
More I say! I cannot wait till act 2!

[VNilla]

Wow.

I can't even. That was really good.

I...

[SIGAWESOME]

there was only a clean, if oddly reddish, street

This conversation was the first thing that came to mind:
Cards: Why does the street look red GB?

Jericho: Red? Heh heh... What do you mean red? I do not see any red! That is just an illusion caused by the sun reflecting off the roadbed at a low angle of incidence! That certainly is not the blood of everyone you knew and grew up with! Don't they teach basic optics in Equestrian schools? Utterly deplorable! Ignorance has no place in a modern, rational world! Next you will be telling me the you believe that Celestia controls the sun or some other silly fairy tale!

Cards: Ummm....

But she was a persistent witch, the sun, and so found ways into my eyes by reflecting off the water. I recalled reading about how reflection of the sun were top reasons why sunburns were particularly nasty out at sea and in the icy wastelands of the world. Water was just evil and actively out to get you like that. You dare drink me? I’ll burn your goddamn face off and hit you with a rake!

If that were not bad enough, water (and snow) has one more dirty trick up its voluminous sleeves; photokeratitis. Not content to "merely" burn your skin from above (and below!), Sun and Water double team up to forcibly violate your eye holes and burn all within. Of course the damage is not immediately apparent, so you do not notice it right up until you are struck with agonising blindness. Sun and Water can both be right proper bastards.

Just my ten cents, since my two cents were free.

A nuisance
who sent, you sent for me?
Now this looks like a job for me...

In the Reich, there is mantra, one that comes from the days when a stallion earned his sword—his true sword that he too would pass down too one day—from his father. They’ll tell you to meditate upon the face of your father, too.

Is this before or after they have to remind Jericho that the Alfalfa and Hayfry MRE is not a personal lubricant?

like a lion licking his lips before he gets devoured by a flock of rabid geese. The goose was the lion’s natural predator, after all.

And both of them better be on guard for the beavers...

On a more serious note though, what is with all the weird, off the wall wildlife asides? It is like H. R. Giger started filling in for Sir David Attenborough. Is Jericho just being his usual, snarky self? Is he trying to take his mind off the atrocities he just committed? Or does he just not know how an ecology that has not been raveged by decades of fighting the Many Angled Ones works?

I get how you’re trying to be all spooky with the masks and the white robes and whatnot, and you probably spent a lot of time dressing up for us, but I’m too damn tired to care.

Heh. This probably does not even rate after all the stuff Jericho went through in the Infantry and with Mr Welch.
Eldritch cliché number 14: Masked Swamp Cult.
Bonus points for nailing the masks to your faces, but otherwise bland and boring.
No glowing runes.
No blood tentacles.
No desecrated, crucified victims around the Void Portal of Lament... Yawn

Or maybe a cult leader. Yes, Father Jericho, the Prophet of the Great Boxing Octopus, who freed the crab people from slavery. Together, brothers and sisters, we can join forces to defeat the evil of the lying waffles, who betrayed our great god during the lesser simulacrum. There. New religion established.

Oh! Oh! can I be the Grand Potato of the Kababalabalalabah?
Mustn't forget about dread Rarity the Destroyer; sworn nemesis of all things crustacean.

Though it was impossible to truly see her eyes through her mask, I could tell she was looking into my eyes. <...> But other than that, it was, needless to say, very eventful as she stared at me and nothing happened. Yep.

Had Jericho been in a snarkier mood, I could easily imagine him staring back at the cultist and saying "Nag, please! I have driven army trained spec ops psychologists to suicide with my issues! You got nothing on me!

the author actually speculated that the original ruins were actually an archaeological camp dedicated to the “antediluvian” ruins further down.

So Jericho et al. are exploring the ruins of an archaeological camp that was exploring the ruins of another archaeological camp exploring another set of ruins?
Mmmm... inceptiony!

<prenatal evolutionary biology lesson>

The more you know...
Thanks to Jericho I now know about the physical effects of hanging, blood loss through castration, and now the sexual role of the Y (sorry, üpsilon) chromosome. Educational!
All we need now is a treatise on nerve agents to complete the NSA bingo keyword collection.

“But what if I still got what I wanted, even as a beast?” I had asked. “What if I should save the world, but leave my heart as payment for that victory?”

What profit a man if he gains the world, but looses his soul?

They’re known to become useless during even the lightest of drizzles, snowstorms, during strong winds, in places that are moist, when threatened, and when exposed to corn-products. They’re pretty worthless, usually. In here, though, they’re useful to him.

Sounds like a new entry is needed for the Evil Overlord list.
I will paint my runes with indelible ink so they are not easily deactivated. My runes will also fail deadly, and be quipped with anti-tamper sigils.

I am simply named C.

Reminds me of this

“But in the days of yore, they called me a… Skendwalkarijaz.” C frowned. “It means—” a pause “—it means skinwalker, one who walks in the skins of others.”

I imagine C and Mr Welch would get along just swimmingly...
As a side note, what role do/did changelings play in Teutcher society? Was Mr Welch just an outlier? For a culture that places a taboo on magic, I cannot imagine Teutcher would look kindly on shape-shifting abilities.

just like that meatball in that old child’s song about the meatball that got sneezed off its plate and ended up as a drug-dealer

Oh down by the Docklands
With the chavs and the thugs,
There worked the Red Meatball,
Who dealt cocaine and drugs.

Meatball was in trouble,
All the budget now gone,
He wasted his money,
And now owed the Don.

The Don was not happy,
He was quite less than pleased,
He ordered a contract,
And shot Meatball's knees.

A lesson was needed,
No faffing with fish,
They cut up poor Meatball,
In a pasta dish.

3154557
Do you require some tissues? A cold shower? A post-coital cigarette perhaps?

[Goggari]

With a single cleave of my sword, she lost her a leg and collapsed to the ground. “Nyo!” I reprimanded in a childish tone. “That’s a bad kitty!”

Pretty sure that's a South Park reference.

“For the King!” and “Good for the Good God!”

They come from "For the Emperor" and "Blood for the Blood God" I presume. (Warhammer 40k)
Anyways, the two references i found from the sea of references aside, amazing job on this chapter! Can't wait for the second act, and especially how you are going to write it. (That last bit probably didn't make any sense)

[Puzzle Reader]

...Well. Damn.
Does it even count as a Wham Episode if it's two in a row?
REALLY glad I ended up not reading this until I had another chapter up after it.

Also, I'm totally going to add Eye Scream to the TV Tropes page.

[Seoman]

Before reading the chapter, only its title, I got my greek lore mixed up and thought of "Ödipus" instead of Orpheus. And after chap 15 it made sense:
With Cards killing her mother, her father being the only one spared from Sleepy Oaks(right? Jericho thought that, right? ), Cards was on the best way to become gender bent Ödipus...
But to right title: It fits the chapter better, actually really well. And the end was... heftig.

[Midnight Rambler]

3186041 Don't forget Overdrawn at the Blood Bank (lampshaded) and Collapsing Lair.

Anyway, Crush, props for referencing the only Avenged Sevenfold song I actually like. And holy fuck, what a chapter.

P.S.: Wait, Rheinwehr? They have a Rhine in your Teutschland? Next you're going to introduce a Weser and an Elbe as well, still insisting that Teutschland isn't Germany.

[Bionicgeth]

Huh. I never expected Lightning Dust to be half Welsh. I don't know why, but I sort of squee'd at the use of Welsh here, what with it technically being my native language, not to mention the idea of Lightning Dust with a valleys accent and speaking Wenglish (Wenglish is when you speak a mixture of Welsh and English, known as bratiaeth in Welsh literary terms) is very amusing to me.

[KingOfTheMuffins]

I shrugged. “Well, really early in-uterus, the sex of a fetus isn’t yet determined exactly, and the default gender of a pony is female. But then the Y-Chromosom activates, the body suddenly stops doing female things; however, by that part, the body has already grown some semblance of nipples and labia. The nipples stay around on us stallions; the labia fuse into the shaft of the penis.” I nodded sagely. “I’d go on about how on the bottom of the shaft there is a scar running from the glands to the scrotum, but… no, wait, I just said it. Well, I went on. I remember how in school I used to go sit at random tables filled with lonely-looking ponies, and one of the things I’d often talk about was that scar, since it always amused them to know all penises were original labias.” I smiled. “Ponies are so fascinating, aren’t they?”

Had a scientific discussion about that in biology. Good times.

I shook my head of the thoughts. “Angst and brooding are for sissies and lame writers who want to pretend like their story has weight and depth. And also for the existentialist movement,”

That reminded me of a Jon Lajoie song, lol.

[sorenxoras]

Excellent job sir, your ending depressed me! Truth be told, I think this would be the perfect ending to a dark story. but being as there is more story you have me very curious about how this would continue. I find it to be 11:57 p.m. and time to press on.

[The Shade]

that mutilated ears

wut.

[The Shade]

skinwalker,

Well fuck, it's The Rake, run away little girl, run away.

[jarrad96]

Wow, is that DOOM reference?