Lost in the past, a chosen hero must save the world to return to her own time. Unfortunately for the world, that hero is Colgate. Can Canterlot's biggest slacker end the terror of the deadites or will she fall victim to the Army of Darkness?
After surviving the longest night of her life, Colgate is more then ready to take a long brake from anything even remotely scary or exciting. Unfortunately for her, she is trapped in Equestria's distant past, caught between warring tribes and the demonically possessed armies of the dead.
Now, with the help of some of the greatest heroes Equestria has ever known, the least capable mare in history must save the world from the Army of Darkness!
A fan fiction remake of Sam Raimi's classic Army of Darkness starring a bunch of pastel ponies and the sequel to The Pony Dead.
“Um… Are thou alright?” The yellow pegasus prodded the listless blue unicorn with a hoof, eliciting only a grumbled response. The pegasus bit her lip and tried to give the unicorn space, but was thwarted in her attempt by the thick chain that held the pair together.
An armored pony, noticing the hold up, glowered at the mares. “What’s the hold up?”
The pegasus felt a shiver run up her spine at the look of cold loathing on the stallion’s face and quickened her pace to match her fellow prisoners. The young pegasus had been told terrible things about the aragonite cruelty of the Unicorn Tribe and had no wish to anger her captures.
“Who are you?”
The pegasus jumped slightly at the unexpected question and turned to see the blue unicorn staring at her.
“I am Private Pansy, miss.” She made as if to salute, but then thought better of it and just gave the other pony a wary smile. “And who are you? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.” She felt her cheeks redden as she quickly added. “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that I never expected to see a unicorn like you chained up like us.”
The unicorn made a gesture that Pansy assumed was dismissive, though it was hard to tell since the foreleg that the other pony was gesturing with ended high above all the bendable parts that most unicorns used to gesture with.
“It’s fine,” the unicorn said with a long-suffering sigh. “It’s sort of a long story, but as far as I can tell we have some time before we get to where we’re going and we might not have a lot of time to talk when we get there.”
Pansy shivered again as she considered the implications of that. “What do you think they’re going to do to us?” she asked.
The unicorn shook her head. “Before they knocked me on the head, they said something about a pit. I don’t know what that was all about, but I am pretty sure it’s nothing pleasant.” She irritably scuffed a hoof in the dirt and cursed under her breath. This was supposed to be a relaxing study break.”
“What ill fate brought you here?” Pansy asked, her own discomfort sliding into the back of her mind as she offered a sympathetic look to the amputee mare.
“Well, let me start from the beginning.” The unicorn took a deep breath and looked to the sky. “First off, my name is Colgate. And as far as I can tell, I am currently lost in time.”
Pansy followed the mare’s gaze up to the sun, which was shining brightly through a thin layer of clouds. “I had that problem for a long time too,” she mused.
“What?” Colgate looked back at Pansy in astonishment. “You did?”
Pansy was slightly taken aback, but nodded. “Oh yes! I used to have the worst time trying to tell the hour without help, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of!” She looked back up to the sun and frowned. “I think it’s about noon though, if that helps.”
Colgate groaned. “OK, one, that’s not what I meant at all; and two, it’s past three in the afternoon.”
“Oh, sorry.” Pansy blushed.
“It’s fine,” Colgate apologized taking another deep breath, “Sorry, it’s been a very long day for me, I didn’t mean to snap at you. What I meant by lost in time was that I am not from… now, I guess.” She frowned and shook her head. “Well however you want to say it, I think I was sent back in time when a spell I cast went array.”
Pansy’s eyes grew to the size of saucers as she stared at Colgate. “So you’re a time traveler?”
“Not intentionally,” Colgate grumbled. “I was trying to defeat a terrible evil that had killed my friends and that was coming after me. The spell I cast was meant to send it back where it came from, but somehow, when I got caught up in it I got dumped off here.”
Pansy gasped, putting a hoof to her mouth. “Could this evil be the same one that has plagued our lands?”
Colgate frowned. “No idea, I just got here a few hours ago. Mind filling me in?”
Pansy nodded furiously, feeling a cautious hope kindle in her chest. “They are called the Deadites and they are terrible demons! They possess the bodies of the dead and do terrible things to the ponies and animals they catch. We have found no way to stop them but to utterly destroy them, and even then they just find a new victim to continue their evil ways.”
Colgate’s face paled as she nodded. “Yep, that sounds pretty familiar alright. You manage to figure out some way of destroying them permanently?”
Pansy shook her head sadly. “No. Commander Hurricane believed that the unicorns had found a book that held the key to stopping them, but that they were deliberately keeping it for themselves, so we were going to... um… borrow it?” Pansy looked away from Colgate, suddenly unable to look her in the eyes. “I mean, I am sure that we would have returned it once our people’s safety was secured.”
“Right,” Colgate said, looking at the irritable guards marching alongside them. “I am sure they will be really understanding once you explain that you were going to bring their monster repellant back to them when you were done with it.”
Pansy looked like she was about to be sick, but managed a weak smile as she almost brought her gaze back up to eye level with Colgate. “But that’s not a problem anymore, because you’re going to fix things!”
Colgate suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, before being yanked violently forward by the momentum of the ponies ahead of her.
“Keep up the pace!” One of the guards snapped as Colgate hurriedly limped back into pace, still staring at Pansy.
“I am going to what?” Colgate’s voice was slightly strained, though from emotion or strangulation Pansy could not tell.
“You’re going to fix all this, right?” The private felt her confidence slipping as she looked at the horrified expression on the unicorn’s face. “You said you cast a spell to stop the deadites in your own time, so you must be the chosen one Clover the Clever spoke of at the last meeting of the tribes. The one who will deliver us from the terror of the deadites!” Pansy felt her confidence slip further as the last of the color drained from Colgate’s face.
“Oh yes!” Colgate chocked out. “I did so well saving my best friend from the things in my own time, that the universe had to set me up for round two! But oh, we don’t want to make it easy so let’s just give you a few dozen handicaps this time!”
As Colgate continued to rant, Private Pansy looked at the looming castle with a growing feeling of dread as her fellow prisoners began to whisper amongst themselves. At their head, wings bound to her sides with thick leather straps, Commander Hurricane glared daggers at the regal white unicorn keeping pace with her.
“You can’t hold us, Platinum! Not after the Earth Ponies find out what you’re up too!” The blue pegasus spat on the ground in contempt.
The unicorn did not bother to look at her captive as she said, “Chancellor Puddinghead may have the brains of a particularly dim goat, but even she could not mistake your blatant act of aggression as anything but what it was, an underhanded and dangerous attempt to undermine my people’s efforts to save ALL of our lives for your own selfish ends!”
Hurricane’s eyes blazed as she growled at the unicorn. “That’s a lie and you know it! You’re protecting your own hides and letting the rest of us burn so that you can take over! Don’t think you have fooled me with your, ‘oh we don’t know how to stop these monsters yet, so you had all just better wait while we hold up in our castles till enough of you get eaten and we can take over the rest, after we conveniently find the salutation too late for the rest of us’ ploy!”
The white unicorn finally turned to the commander with a look of undisguised contempt. “You are either a phenomenally bad liar or a raving lunatic.” Her expression hardened as she looked to the rapidly approaching castle. “I’ll be doing your tribe an immeasurable service by removing you from command.”
The shadow of the portcullis fell over the front of the line, hiding the Commander’s face as her voice dropped to a growl. “Mark my words, Princess; I would have just taken the book to save my people, but for this mistreatment of me and mine, I will see your castle burn!”
Further back Private Pansy whimpered. “Oh my, I do wish Commander Hurricane wouldn’t antagonize Princess Platinum like that! She is cross enough as it is!”
Colgate, who had become rather disappointed after finishing her rant, merely grunted noncommittally.
“I just have the most terrible feeling about this,” Pansy moaned as the two passed under the shadow of the castle wall. From ahead, they heard the sounds of shouts and jeers as the townsponies booed and harangued the captured pegasi. Soon enough the two chained mares were marched into the waiting angry mob.
“Villains!” A pony screeched from the throng, “It’s your fault the dead walk again! Your dark magic has doomed us all!”
Pansy shrank from the accusations, but Colgate’s eyes flashed with anger as she glared in the direction of the voice. “Oh come on!” she shouted. “Whoever heard of a pegasus using dark magic anyway?”
There was a slight lull in the mob as several of the ponies took a moment to ponder this. Then the same voice as before piped up again, “Traitor! Your dark magic has doomed us all!” The mob, seeming happy with this explanation, took up the jeers and threats with renewed gusto.
“Well it was a nice try,” Pansy offered with a weak smile as Colgate was pelted with bits of rotten vegetable.
“Well that’s just groovy,” Colgate drawled sarcastically. “Because everypony loves a good samareitan.”
The guards lined the prisoners up against the castle wall alongside a large, covered well. Princess Platinum slowly circled around to face her captives, along with her brown-robed assistant who looked as if she would rather be just about anywhere other than where she was at the moment. The Princess paused to give Colgate an especially nasty look before clearing her throat. “Soldiers of the Pegasus Tribe, for your blatant invasion of our lands I could easily have you locked away for the rest of your miserable lives!” There was a swell of cheers from the crowd, but the Princess held up a hoof for silence. “However, given your openly admitted desire to steal from us the book that can and will save not only our tribe, but our very race, you have committed a crime against ALL of ponykind!”
The crowd roared its displeasure and the captives shrank in fear, all save Commander Hurricane whose unflinching gaze never left the Princess. The Princess, returning the stare, raised a hoof for silence once more. “For your crimes,” she began, voice dripping with loathing. “I hereby sentence you to the, worst, possible thing! THE PIT!”
Once more the crowd erupted into cheers and a chant of “Pit! Pit! Pit!” began to pick up till almost everypony seemed to be screaming it so loudly that the captives could not even hear what the Princess was shouting to her guards. But the message soon became clear as a pair of unicorns quickly began to crank a winch which slid open the doors to the surprisingly large well.
As the crowd’s cries subsided enough to be heard over, the Princess pointed to Commander Hurricane. “Now, since you seemed so eager to leave me helpless as my subjects died, I shall give you the same courtesy!”
Commander Hurricane suddenly lunged against her bounds, face twisted into a snarl of rage. “You’ll pay for this!” she screamed, struggling to free herself even as a pair of unicorn guards hauled her back into line. “Do what you will with me, but leave them alone!”
“Loyal to the end,” Princess Platinum sneered. “Maybe if you had tempered that sense of duty with a little empathy and kindness you would not have thought to damn others for your own sake. All of this might have been avoided!” She jabbed a hoof towered Colgate and Pansy. “Now, bring forward the first prisoners for the pit! Let us start with the traitor!”
Colgate felt herself being unshackled from the other prisoners and blanched. “Whoa, whoa, wait up!” Colgate began to panic as she and Pansy where marched past the Princess. “Hey, hold up! I am not with them!”
The Princess gave Colgate a skeptical look before looking to Commander Hurricane. “Well?”
Commander Hurricane shook her head. “Do what you want with the unicorn, but she is not one of mine. If you kill her, it’s just more innocent blood on your hoofs!”
Princess Platinum’s brow furrowed in thought as she stopped the guards holding Colgate. She looked into the other mare’s pleading eyes and for a second seemed unsure. Then her eyes narrowed. “Do you too take me for a fool?” The Princess asked in a low and dangerous voice.
“What?” Colgate asked breaking into a cold sweat.
“I was not a foal so recently that I would fall for the oldest trick in the library.” Platinum’s lip curled into a sneer. “Pretending to not know one another too fool me into releasing you. Even for a traitor you are without honor.”
With a harsh shove, Pansy and Colgate where forced towards the pit. Pansy, stumbling forward, teetered on the edge for a moment before falling, screaming into the darkness. Colgate managed to catch the lip before following her down, but felt a hard tug as the weight of her fellow captive almost wrenched her free. With a burst of adrenaline she pulled herself up just enough to get her head over the edge.
“You have to believe! I’m NOT a-“
“Traitor!” Colgate was interrupted as a purple mare suddenly burst from the crowd, hurling a tankard at Colgate with deadly accuracy.
Colgate’s head exploded in pain as she tumbled backward into the pit, her own scream joining that of her companion as the both plunged into the depths.
Colgate heard the splash a second before she plunged into murky water. Water rushed into her open mouth and in an instant her fear of falling was replaced with an even greater fear of drowning, which was just as quickly replaced with pain as she hit the bottom of the shallow pool with enough force to knock the wind from her lungs. She reflexively gasped for air, inhaling a sizable lungful of water for her trouble.
Colgate’s head had just cleared enough to start panicking properly when she felt a pair of hoofs wrap around her and haul her upwards. Nightmarish images of the creatures that had killed her friends and taken her leg flashed through Colgate’s mind as she tried to jerk free of her assailant’s hold.
As her head broke the surface of the water, and her ears were assaulted with the echoing jeers and catcalls from the ponies above. She also heard the grunting of whatever unspeakable thing had grabbed her. She lurched forward, trying to free herself from its grasp once again, but was foiled by her own body as she violently coughed out a mouthful of foul-tasting water. Her assailant bent forward, allowing Colgate to wretch out what felt like a gallon of water.
“Are thou feeling better?” her surprisingly soft-spoken assailant inquired.
Colgate looked back to see the pale, soaked face of Private Pansy looking back at her, the chain securing them by the neck dripping with water.
“I have been better,” Colgate admitted, rubbing her head with a hoof, feeling for cuts. “I guess I should just feel lucky to have you here to keep me from drowning.”
The Private’s cheeks flushed a rosy red as she ducked behind her wet mane. “Oh my, I hardly did anything another would not have in my situation.”
Colgate gave the pegasus an encouraging smile. “Hey, you’re selling yourself short. You haven’t thrown anypony into a huge pit or thrown rocks at their head or anything today! As far as I am concerned that’s putting you way ahead of the rest of these primitive savages!” The last two words where shouted up at the crowd peering down at them. The crowd responded with a string of insults and profanities, as well as a few bits of rotten fruit. Colgate stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry back at them. “And your pit is terrible! I have magic, geniuses! All I need to do is free her wings and we are out of your primitive, stupid death trap! What do you think about that?”
“I don’t think that they meant for the fall to kill us,” Pansy replied, slowly backing toward Colgate.
“Why?” Colgate asked, a cold feeling running down her spin as she slowly turned to look at Private Pansy.
“Because of that,” Pansy answered, voice rising to a terrified squeak as she pointed a shaking hoof toward a rotten, pony-shaped monstrosity, slowly wading toward them from some dark and hidden side passage of the well.
“Oh,” Colgate said, feeling her heart sink. Then a thought struck her. “Oh! That thing has been living in here? In the water?” She looked from the rotten thing to the water and blanched. “Ew,ew, ew! That was in my mouth!” Colgate began to dance on the spot as the creature’s head titled in confusion.
Colgate stuck out her tongue and began to wretch as Private Pansy looked at her in confused horror. “What’s wrong?” Pansy asked, looking from Colgate to the monster as if unsure which to be more concerned about.
“I need a toothbrush!” Colgate wailed.
The creature, who had been watching this display with slack-jawed bewilderment, took a moment to recompose itself. The blue unicorn’s reaction seemed to have put it off its game somewhat, but it was rapidly recovering. Taking a breath, it dropped its mouth open, bellowed an indescribable howl of rage and charged the winged pony.
Pansy screamed in terror as the monster lunged forward. She backed up against Colgate and squeezed her eyes shut. As Pansy heard the thing close in, a stray thought passed through her head. At least I will die next to somepony who was nice to me. This thought she found oddly comforting. Then the monster was upon her. She screamed again as the demon tackled her into the water, its hot, rancid breath filling her nose.
Then, suddenly, she felt the weight of the creature fly off of her. She paddled madly to keep her head above water as she opened her eyes to see Colgate wadding out in front of her, horn glowing with magic. Colgate’s horn crackled menacingly as she lowered her head as if to charge. “Get away from her, you brute!”
The demon responded by screaming in rage and charging again. At the last second Colgate’s horn flashed as she dove to the side, while at the same moment Pansy felt a magical force throw her to the other side. Just as the chain was pulled taut, the creature rushed directly into the connecting iron links. Both mares once again found themselves flung bodily through the air as the chain pulled tightly around the monster’s neck. Grunting, the creature tried to spin to attack Pansy, but only succeeded in tightening the chain around itself.
Colgate, seeing the creature’s attention had turned to her new found friend, wrapped her legs around the monster’s body, pinning two of its flailing legs in the process. Unable to hold itself up, the creature was plunged straight down into the shallow water. Colgate had just enough time to take a deep breath before her senses were muffled by the water rushing over her head.
Underneath her, the monster twisted and writhed, trying to free itself from Colgate’s hold. Colgate gritted her teeth and pulled hard, holding the monster’s head below the water as a scream from the demon’s other side conferred that Pansy had at least managed to surface. Colgate however was beginning to feel the burn as her lungs began to cry out for air. As if sensing this need, the creature violently jerked one of its free legs into Colgate’s gut. Colgate wheezed as the remaining wind was knocked out of her in a stream of bubbles.
Colgate’s eyes shot open as her instincts kicked in and she began desperately trying to disentangle herself from the monster, to get back up to the surface. To her horror, the monster’s grinning face turned back to face her as it clutched her own legs into place against its body. Too late, Colgate thought to ask herself if a rotten corpse being ridden by an age old demonic spirit would actually need to breath. As her vision began to darken and the leering face of the monster slowly grew larger as its mouth opened, revealing a double row of jagged teeth, Colgate surmised the answer was probably no.
As the world dimmed to near blackness, Colgate felt a horrible pressure on the sides of her head. With an almost clinically detached disinterest, Colgate’s dying mind registered that her head was being crushed in the abomination’s jaws. Colgate suddenly wished more than anything that she had drowned already as the terrible pressure grew and grew.
Then suddenly the pressure disappeared, leaving only a throbbing pain in its wake as Colgate was once again yanked bodily out of the water. Colgate’s lungs screamed as she desperately sucked in air, water cascading from her in a sheet, dimly aware of screams and shouts from above. She looked to the side to see Pansy desperately trying to hold onto the shaft of a familiar ax, whose head was buried deep in the back of the monster. Confused, Colgate looked up to see a struggling purple mare in brown robes being restrained by a pair of guards.
The mare, seeing Coalgate looking up, tore free from her assailants long enough to dive to the lip of the pit and scream, “Strange one, take up your ax!” before she was grabbed and hauled back by the princess’s guards.
Colgate shook her head as she turned back to the struggling Pansy. She leapt forward, grabbing the ax shaft with her magic as she did so. “Pansy, let go!”
Pansy obliged, releasing her hold on the ax as Colgate’s magic wrenched it free from the monster’s back and swung it around to her side. The demon spun around to glare back at Colgate as the unicorn levitated the weapon in front of her face menacingly.
The demon growled in frustration as it glared at Colgate. “What does it take to kill you?”
“Apparently more than monsters, evil trees, drowning and cannibalism,” Colgate replied tiredly. Watching as Private Pansy quietly snuck around the side of the distracted creature, keeping as much distance as the chain would allow between her and it.
“I have devoured the flesh and souls of a half dozen brave knights who have come down to drive me out,” the creature hissed, slowly advancing on Colgate. “Each one was armed and armored far better than your pathetic, little toy there.” Colgate did not respond, but kept the ax level toward the monster’s body. The creature’s eyes darted toward Pansy and its mouth curved into a sinister, toothy grin. “And not a one of them was tied to another so helpless.”
Private Pansy made a small sound, somewhere between a squeak and a scream as she hurried to circle back around Colgate. Colgate frowned at the monster. “Those are some big words, considering you’re talking about the pony that just put an ax in your back.”
The creature made several dry heaving sounds that Colgate assumed were meant to be laughter. “A blade in the back is no bravery. That irritation saved your life for a time, but will mean nothing, in the end.”
“If you’re so confident,” Colgate shifted her weight, “Why don’t you just come and try and get us, huh?”
The demon made the horrible laughing sound again and pointed a hoof at Private Pansy. “Let’s just say that I have a sense of honor about these things. She is not of your tribe and a liability to boot. Let me have her and I will give you time to release yourself from your chains while I devour her. What do you say?”
Pansy gasped, but Colgate just laughed. “Wow! Just wow! Like that’s not the most obvious trap I have EVER heard! I mean, come on. Give me a little credit here, ok?” From behind, Pansy began to whimper and Colgate looked back at her with a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, even if it wasn’t a dumb trick, there is no way I would let him have you.”
“Look out!” Pansy screamed as Colgate heard the sound of loud splashing as the monster took advantage of her distraction to attack.
With a loud crunch the ax lashed out through the air with deadly speed, catching the monster by surprise as Colgate sidestepped its now-out-of-control charge. As the monster splashed into the water yet again, Colgate stepped forward, bringing the ax down over her head in a wide, arcing strike.
Pansy and the ponies above watched in slack-jawed silence and disgust as Colgate proceeded to hack apart the body of the possessed pony with one heavy swing after another. Finally, after the body had been reduced to a quivering pile of meat, Colgate sat back in the dark red water and sighed.
“Like I would just look away like that. Idiot.” Colgate shook her head as she beckoned to Pansy. After a moment’s hesitation the mare slowly approached the horrible red mass and the unicorn sitting in the middle of it. The unicorn waited till her companion was only a few feet away before gently tugging on her chain to pull her in close. Bowing her head, Colgate closed her eyes as a ray of blue magic shot from her horn and engulfed the lock keeping Pansy attached to the chain. Then, after several long seconds of awkward, smelly silence, there was a faint click and Private Pansy’s collar popped off and fell into the water with a splash.
Pansy jumped back with a cry of delight as she rubbed her neck where she had been violently pulled around by for the last several hours. “I’m free!” She screamed, dancing a joyful little jig.
“Well, I still need to get your wings and then you can get me out of this pit, but then we will be free, yes,” Colgate stated dryly, lifting up the heavy chain still dangling from her own neck.5
“Oh right,” Pansy amended with a blush
Less than a minute later Private Pansy flew up out of the pit and into the noonday sky. All around her shocked and silent ponies stood and gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the first pony to leave the pit alive in weeks. Even Princess Platinum and Commander Hurricane seemed at a loss for words as Pansy picked up a length of rope and tossed it down to her new friend.
By the time Colgate had pulled herself out of the pit, breathing heavily, at least one pony had gotten over her shock as the purple unicorn who had been pulled off by the guards earlier pushed her way up to the Princess’s side once more.
“I told you.” She whispered, excitedly pointing to Colgate. “I told you she was the one of whom to prophecies spoke!”
Colgate, having recovered her breath, marched to the Princess, a determined look in her eye. As she approached, Princess Platinum rose to her full height, determined to face any accusation or rebuke the pony had with dignity. As Colgate came face to face with Platinum, she stopped and stared directly at her for long moment before quickly looking down to her hoofs and back up again.
“You know you have some monster blood on your hoof?” Colgate stated flatly.
Platinum’s cheeks reddened as she maintained eye contact with the other pony for several seconds before looking down to check her carefully-maintained hoofs. To her surprise, when she looked down she did see a very dirty, blood-stained hoof, but it was much more blue then her own. Before she had time to register exactly what sort of indignity she was about to suffer Colgate’s hoof stuck her squirrely in the snout with enough force to knock her sprawling.
The crowd of ponies gasped as Colgate spun around to face them. Spotting a guard who was hesitantly pulling his sword from its scabbard, Colgate pointed her gore-soaked ax at him. “Do you want to go next?” She demanded.
The pony immediately went white as a sheet and dropped his weapon, shaking his head violently. Several other guards did the same as the townsfolk who had been jeering now backed away in fright. “That’s what I thought.” Colgate growled.
Spinning, she next pointed toward the line of prisoners, whom Private Pansy had already begun to attempt to free. Pansy dropped the lock she had been fiddling with as she noticed Colgate pointing in her direction. Colgate shook her head and shouted, “Somepony free those captives! They’re not responsible for any of this!”
Immediately several armored ponies started as if a fire had been lit under their rears and quickly set to work freeing the Pegasus ponies from their bounds. As she was freed, Commander Hurricane took to the sky with a victorious shout. Looking down at Colgate she flashed a devilish grin. “I was wrong about you unicorns, it seems,” she called. “You’re a credit to your people Time Keeper and I owe you a debit!”
“Thanks.” Colgate waved with her ax. “It’s just Colgate though. The cutie mark is a long story.”
“And one I have no time for, so save it!” Hurricane interrupted quickly, before turning her attention to Princess Platinum, who was only just rising back to her hooves. “Excuse me Princess, but you have been a terrible host. I will have to repay your hospitality some other day though, as I need to fly!” And with that she took off, over the castle walls and into the blue sky, her followers forming into formation behind her.
“NO!” The Princess’s face contorted into an expression of equal parts panic and rage as she watched her captives fly away safely. “Somepony! Anypony! Stop them!”
A few unicorns halfheartedly raised their spears, but it was already too late to hit any of the escaping pegasi and the unicorns knew it, as did the Princess. Platinum’s eyes flashed as she glared at Colgate. “You!”
Colgate sighed and waved back to the Princess, her horn beginning to glow a bright blue as she rested the ax on the ground besides her. “Hi.”
Platinum’s eye twitched as she beckoned to her squire. As the small pink filly carefully brought out her personal blade, the purple mare stepped up beside her.
“Princess, I know you are angry, but this pony is our best hope for stopping-”
Princess Platinum shot a dangerous glare at her adviser. “Clover, my nearest and dearest adviser,” she whispered. “If you don’t shut up about the ‘chosen one’ and get out of my way this instant, I shall personally see to it that you spend the next month cleaning every floor in the castle!” The purple pony looked at the twitching, furious face of her liege and quietly backed away.
Princess Platinum took hold of her sword and drew it with such ferocity that the tiny filly holding it for her was knocked to the ground. “Now, for that arrogance…” She paused as the filly began to snivel.
“Is that filly ok?” Colgate asked.
“She is fine!” Princess Platinum shouted back, indignantly. There was an awkward silence as the filly started to cry. The Princess sighed as she picked up the filly and gave her a hug. Platinum shifted her stance to hold out the sword again while holding the still-sniveling pony away from Colgate. “Now where was I?”
“Something about my arrogance?” Colgate offered.
“Yes, thank you darling,” Princess Platinum said before frowning. “By which I mean that your arrogance shall cost you dearly! You have betrayed your race, attacked your rightful Princess and for all that I shall see you… Hold on.”
Colgate nodded, waving a hoof as a purple earth pony hurried from the crowed to the Princess. Platinum tried to maintain a proud stance, sword raised as she carefully gave her squire back to her mother.
“I am sorry about that milady,” the mare apologized, bowing.
“No, no, I shouldn’t have been so rough with the poor dear.” Princess Platinum shook her head. Finally, as the mother and daughter disappeared back into the crowd, Platinum turned her attention back to Colgate. “Now as I was saying, for that arrogance-”
“You mentioned that part already,” Colgate called, her horn glowing brightly.
“For that arrogance, I will see you dead!” The Princess shouted over Colgate. To her consternation Colgate just rolled her eyes.
With a shout Princess Platinum charged forward, blade held high, gleaming in light of the sun as her cape bellowed out behind her. Colgate slowly pushed herself to her hoofs, bowing her head to meet the charging royal. Then the world exploded with a deafening explosion of sound and light.
The crowd of ponies flinched back as Princess Platinum swayed uneasily, trying to hold her balance. Giving up on the last cause, she sat back heavily and stared in dumbfounded consternation at the bent remains of her sword. Looking back she saw the rest of the blade embedded in a wooden post behind her.
Colgate for her own part was feeling more than a little lightheaded after the massive surge of magical energy, but turned to face the crowd. “Yeah,” she muttered. “You all saw that?” she asked, voice rising in volume. “That was my… Boom… Spell!”
As the crowd gasped and cowered Colgate silently cursed herself for not paying closer attention in her self-defense classes. Still, feeling that she had gotten the crowd’s attention, she continued. “I learned that little trick from the finest self-defense master in all of lower Canterlot! A class that cost me about two hundred bits, but that was worth every one!” She glared fiercely at the ponies, as if daring them to question her investment. None did.
“If there is one thing that my master taught me, it was this: you don’t kill ponies!” She glared at Princess Platinum. “Not even if you think that pony might be a changeling queen who is going to brainwash you and your friends into becoming mindless zombie bridesmaids… again.” The Princess just looked at her confused and Colgate quickly moved on.
“Because killing is wrong!” She looked around at the ponies in the crowd. “I know that you are all scared right now, but you can’t let that turn you into crazy ponies. You almost tossed a bunch of your fellow ponies into a horrible murder pit, just because you didn’t like them. And that’s wrong!” She turned and pointed a hoof at the still-dazed Princess who was now being attended by her advisor. “I am sorry if I hit you Princess, that was wrong of me, but violence is not the answer here.”
Suddenly a pony in the crowd screamed and Colgate spun to face the pit, where the waterlogged corpse of a unicorn knight had just pulled itself over the rim. The corpse snarled at Colgate as it pushed itself to all fours.
“You have not bested me yet, chosen one!” It screeched.
With a yelp Colgate picked up her ax and telekinetically hurled it at the monster. Caught off guard, the beast was struck directly in the head with the ax and toppled backward into the pit. Wasting no time, Colgate grabbed the hilt of Princess Platinum’s sword and cut the rope that Private Pansy had left for her to free herself from the pit with.
Turning back to the crowd she took a moment to compose herself, then sighed and shook her head. “Oh forget it,” she groaned. “Let’s just figure out how I can get back home.”
Colgate carefully settled onto the luxurious reclining couch with a contented sigh. The Princess’s personal physician had cleaned her wounds before wrapping them in bandages soaked in strange-smelling salve, which had caused her aching body to go wonderfully numb. For the first time since losing her leg, Colgate felt truly at peace. She was about to close her eyes and allow herself a long overdue nap when a polite cough alerted her to the arrival of the Princess’s advisor.
“Can this wait?” Colgate muttered, making a point of yawning loudly.
“I fear we can afford very little delay, Chosen One,” the unicorn apologized. “I understand that you must take some time to regain your strength, but as soon as you are recovered you must be prepared with full knowledge of what you must do!”
Colgate groaned and rolled her eyes. “Look, miss…”
“Clover,” the mare stated promptly, offering a hoof in greeting. Colgate looked at the hoof and wiggled her stump at it. Blushing, Clover retracted her hoof and instead bowed her head. “I am Clover the Clever, First Advisor to the Lady Princess Platinum and a student of the great sage, Star Swirl.”
Colgate’s brows furrowed as a vague memory of some old pageant play drifted through the back of her head. She had a strong suspicion that something about the names Clover was saying should mean something to her and an even stronger suspicion that if she had not spent that play trying to think of ways to ask Lyra if she was seeing anypony without making it obvious she would probably be able to recall more of it.
“Reciting the words Klaatu Verata Nikto should allow you to remove the book without difficulty,” Clover continued as Colgate realized with a guilty start that she had missed most of the lecture. “So obviously, I didn’t want to risk not letting you know this before you left.”
Colgate nodded and did her best to look thoughtful. “Yes, yes, very important. I am glad you told me all of that useful… stuff.” Clover beamed as Colgate quickly added, “But it’s probably best if you repeat that again after I have had a chance to sleep, so it’s doubly clear for me.”
“It is my great pleasure to serve.” Clover bowed. “And might I just say what a treat it is to have such a receptive audience! I would not speak ill of my Lady as she has been a most generous benefactor to my studies and those of my mentor, but it sometimes seems as if she is hardly even paying attention to half of what I say!” Clover laughed.
“Yeah, you said it,” Colgate agreed distractedly as she watched the purple earth pony from before enter the room with a bow, followed by a small cadre of servers.
Clover gave Colgate an annoyed look. “Does something about our blacksmith demand your attention, Chosen One?”
“Huh?” Colgate started and blushed. “Oh I mean, no! I was paying attention to what you were saying!”
“Of course you were.” Clover shook her head. “I suppose you were just allowing your eyes to wander as your mind remained focused on me?”
Colgate tried a nervous smile. “Yes?”
Clover rolled her eyes. “What is it exactly that fascinates you so about her?”
Colgate shrugged. “Well I think she hit me in the head with a mug, her foal carries the Princess’s sword, she is an earth pony in a unicorn castle and I am hungry and there’s a bunch of food behind her. So that, mostly.”
“Well, I suppose I can hardly fault you for that.” Clover frowned. “If it will sate your curiosity and allow you to considerate on more pressing matters, she is here in the castle because her former husband was a knight in the service of my lady and because my lady values her skill with a hammer enough to take on her child as a personal squire to give her cause to stay here even after the father’s death.”
“Oh,” Colgate said, unable to think of anything better to say, she added, “How did he… you know?”
Clover looked guiltily at Colgate. “He was sent into the pit to kill the creature you slew earlier.”
“Oh…” Colgate repeated, feeling color rise to her cheeks as the earth pony and the food bearers approached.
“I am not interrupting anything, am I?” The earth pony asked as the servants laid out the platters of food.
“No not at all!” Colgate stammered. “We were just… NOT talking about you!”
The earth pony looked confused as she stared at Colgate, whose face was slowly turning an alarming shade of scarlet. “Are you feeling alright, milady? You look unwell.”
Colgate began to sweat as she shook her head. “Nope! I am feeling just fine, just a little lightheaded is all.” As the earth pony stared guiltily Colgate mentally kicked herself. “Oh, but not because you hit me in the head with a big wooden cup and knocked me into a horrible pit with a flesh eating zombie that ate your husband, so it’s alright!”
There was a long silence as everypony in the room fell quiet and stared at Colgate. “Um,” Colgate coughed. “Not that I would know anything about that, because I wasn’t talking about you behind your back or... um, anything like that.”
After another long, awkward silence Clover cleared her throat. “Berry Sledge, I apologize for the Chosen One’s candor. She has been administered a strong poultice to ease her pains and I fear it has affected her better judgment.”
The earth pony nodded slowly, eyes drifting to the bandage wrapped tightly around the unicorns head. “I understand.”
“So, are those grapes?” Colgate asked loudly, trying to change the subject. “Because I do love grapes!” She tried to pluck a grape from one of the platters with her magic. She managed to lift the fruit a few inches off the plate before a wave of dizziness overtook her and her magic faltered.
“My apologies Chosen One,” Clover apologized, picking the stray grape off the floor and tossing it away. “But the medication you have been given will leave you rather weak while it heals your wounds.” She smiled sheepishly. “I perhaps should have mentioned some of the effects to you before I prescribed it.”
“You think?” Colgate growled, words beginning to slur slightly.
“Here, let me help,” Berry Sledge muttered, picking up the stem of the grape bunch in her teeth and dangling the berries in front of Colgate’s mouth. The unicorn looked up and felt her cheeks flush once again at the proximity of the other mare’s face to her own.
“Thank you,” Colgate quickly blurted, voice raising half an octave. She tried to lift her head up to eat a grape, but managed to rise only a few millimeters off the couch before a wave of dizziness swept over her again. Slumping back down, she shot a horrified look at Clover who was looking concerned.
“How strong was that stuff?” Colgate demanded weakly.
“Well normally it should dull pain, relax the body and speed recovery, all of which does tire ponies out quite a bit,” Clover explained cautiously. “But given how many wounds needed to be treated and with how potent a dosage I used to speed recovery, the effects might be slightly magnified.” Clover cleared her throat before repeating with more confidence, “Slightly.”
Colgate yawed. “Oh this is just great! I am-” She yawned again. “I am going to probably going to slip into a coma because somepony messed up trying to heal me! That is the most stupidly ironic thing I have ever heard.” Colgate yawed again as Clover frowned. Before she could say anything though, Berry set aside the grapes and laid a hoof on Colgate’s chest.
“There, there Chosen One.” Berry cooed, slowly rubbing Colgate’s chest and belly. “You have had a very big day and now you’re just grumpy and tired.” She gave Colgate a warm smile as the unicorn blushed and closed her eyes. “You saved us all from a terrible evil and everypony in this castle is grateful to you for that.”
Colgate felt like a foal, but could not deny that the familiar panic that had started to seep back into her brain was fading away as the blacksmith lulled her to sleep. As she felt herself drift off, she heard Berry murmur, “And I know you could have either killed my Princess or attacked her when she was distracted with my daughter and that I will never forget.”
* * *
Colgate groaned into a damp patch of droll as she began the slow and laborious process of waking up. She cracked an eye open, then immediately shut it again as a blinding ray of sunlight lanced directly into her sensitive pupil. With another groan she rolled back to face the back of the couch, pulling the blanket over her head with magic.
“Oh good, you’re awake!” An irritatingly loud voice shouted from somewhere at Colgate’s back.
Colgate tried to wave off the speaker with a hoof, but was foiled when her leg proved to be too short to get out from under the blanket. For a long moment this baffled Colgate before the events of the last twenty four hours crashed back down into her like a bucket of ice water.
With a rustle Colgate stuck her head out from under the blanket to stare balefully at Clover, who was accompanied by a servant with a small tray of food. Clover waved at the tray with a hoof. “You slept through the morning meal, but I thought you might appreciate a little food when you came too.”
Colgate made a sound somewhere between a snort and a sigh as she levitated up a piece of toast from the tray and shoved it into her mouth. The servant set down the tray and left with a bow as Clover took a seat across from Colgate.
“How are you feeling?” Clover asked as Colgate crammed a chunk of fruit into her mouth along with the toast.
Colgate tried to mumble something around the food in her mouth before giving up and swallowing. “Good. Much better than last night.” She picked up another piece of toast. “Sorry, I didn’t realize how hungry I was till just now. Do you happen to have any hay fries?”
Clover shook her head. “I have no idea what those might be Chosen One, but I can ask the staff to attempt to prepare something to your specifications.” She tapped a hoof. “But that can wait, for now. While you have done us all a great service in slaying the beast in the well, as well as the other beast that we had not realized was also in the well till you also slew it, we have greater troubles to attend to.” She gave Colgate a grave look as the other unicorn paused in her breakfast binge, cheeks bulging with fruit slices.
Colgate nodded slowly and choked out something that sounded similar to ‘I’m listening’ and so Clover continued.
“A week before your arrival a group of knights lead by the captain of the guard left from this castle to retrieve the Necronomicon. As I told you last night, we have been… exaggerating how close we were to actually having the book in our possession, both to keep our own ponies calm, but also to assuage the worries of the other tribes.” Clover looked slightly abashed as she quickly added, “Though we have been able to learn much from those notes and pages kept here in the castle library, so it is hardly that great of an exaggeration!”
Colgate nodded, slowly chewing.
“Even so, we will need to recover the Necronomicon itself to stop this menace once and for all.” Clover continued, getting back into the swing of things. “Princess Platinum led the rescue mission after the knights did not return, but instead found you and Commander Hurricane’s forces.” Clover had the dignity to look abashed as she said, “You have to understand that Princess Platinum has been almost sick with worry after her knights, ever since they went missing. When she found you and the Commander, she let her anger get the better of her.”
Colgate nodded slowly, rolling her eyes as she surreptitiously ate another piece of toast.
“Well,” Clover said uncomfortably. “At any rate, if my readings of what we have copied from the book are to be believed, only the Chosen One, a pony sent from another world to deliver us all from the terror of the deadites, can retrieve the Necronomicon from its resting place. That is why you and you alone, must venture to the ancient resting spot of that terrible book and bring it back to us here.”
Colgate frowned. “OK, so where is this ancient resting place of the evil book? Because I am not much of a long distance runner.” She waggled her stump for emphasis.
“Oh we have something to help with that,” Clover said happily. “And it’s not even that far! Less than a day’s trot!”
Colgate looked surprised. “Wait, why is your castle built within walking distance of unbelievable evil?”
Clover shrugged. “It is a very small area of unspeakable evil and it did not bother anypony who did not go to near it until recently. You can hardly blame us for thinking it was a small price to pay for such an abundant seat for our new capitol.”
Colgate shrugged noncommittally before being struck by a something. “Wait a minute! Did you just say something a second ago about helping me walk?”
“Oh yes!” Clover sat up and clapped her hoofs together. “Our blacksmith has been working through the night on a gift for you! Come, I’ll show it to you!” And with that she hurried Colgate off the couch and out the door.
Soon Colgate found herself lead out into the castle courtyard. All around her, ponies milled about or hurried along, tending to their errands. As the two mares moved through the crowds, many ponies turned their heads and stared, before turning to their companions and whispering. Colgate felt an uncomfortable tightness in her stomach as more and more ponies stopped what they had been doing to watch her.
“Why are there so many ponies here?” She asked Clover, keeping her voice low. “This castle hardly looks big enough to house half of them, so what gives?”
“The deadites.” Clover replied sadly. “Back in the home lands, we had a great fortified city in which many of the tribe lived in comfort and peace.” Clover looked at the watching crowds and sighed. “Back then, Midnight Castle was an impenetrable stronghold and a safe haven in times of danger. Here in this new land though, we are lucky to have even this small keep to call a capitol.” She gave Colgate a sidelong glance as they reached the shop. “More ponies arrive every day seeking protection and we have naught left to give them but a safe place to stay. Soon we will not even have that as space dwindles.”
“So, no pressure on me then, right?” Colgate gulped.
Clover looked confused and annoyed as she opened the door the blacksmith’s shop. “On the contrary, Chosen One! There is immense pressure on you to succeed and quickly! Honestly, it’s like you have deliberately missed my point!”
Colgate groaned as she followed Clover into the cramped workshop. Along the walls, tools hung in neat rows, while in the center of the room was a great forge alive with the embers of rosy red coals. To the side of the forge stood a large anvil, coated black save for its worn and silvery head. Alongside that was placed a wooden bucket, filled with sooty water. Curled around the bucket, snoring softly, was the blacksmith.
Clover snorted and stamped a hoof, giving the sleeping pony a disapproving look. “Berry, what, pray tell, are you doing?”
“Sleeping,” the earth pony replied as she stretched out her limbs in a way that made her look less like a pony and more like an oversized cat. “I worked a miracle forging this wonder in but one night, so mayhaps you would be so kind as to seize crawling up my rump about…” Berry trailed off as she saw Colgate. She scrambled to her hoofs, face suddenly reddening as she dusted herself off.
“My apologies, lady Chosen One! I have forgotten my manners.” Berry bowed.
“Oh don’t worry about that,” Colgate offered, waving off the bow with a smile. “I’ve said way worse things to my marefriends when they have woken me up before I was good and ready!” Colgate grinned sheepishly. “Or I did, a really long time ago.”
There was a long uncomfortable pause as Berry’s face slowly turned the color of a tomato and Clover looked uncomfortably anywhere other than Colgate. Eventually Colgate broke the silence. “Um, this isn’t a touch subject with you two is it? Because I know some ponies get a bit weird talking about private stuff.”
“Leg!” Berry blurted out quickly ducking behind her anvil. “I need to get your leg!”
Clover cleared her throat. “I am sorry Chosen One, but you must understand that, while customs where you come from may be…” She took a moment then finished, “Lax on matters of propriety, we unicorns are not so debauched as our Pegasus kin. We share in the earnest virtues of our earth pony sisters.”
Colgate frowned. “Hey, you don’t need to get personal! It wasn’t like I was sleeping around or anything, wow! Way to be judgmental, Clover.”
Clover shook her head. “That’s not what I meant, it’s just that… Oh forget it!” She rolled her eyes. “Your importance transcends any personal qualms I may have, but just know that you may not wish to be so open with your… affairs of the heart while you are here at the castle.”
“Gosh, you would think we were living in a children’s play listening to you.” Colgate grumbled. “I never thought olden day ponies would be so sensitive about the idea of-”
“Hard work all through the night!” Berry cried, slamming a metal leg on the anvil with a clang. “But I think you will agree that the fruits of my labor have been worth the effort.” Colgate’s eyes widened at the sight of the leg as her jaw slackened. What she had expected to see was a fancy metal peg leg, which would certainly beat strapping a poker to her stump certainly, but nothing overly fancy. What she had not expected was a contraption that looked like a comic book pony’s leg! As she tentatively bent the metal marvel’s foreleg at the joint, Berry grinned.
“How did you make something like this?” Colgate asked, looking up at the blacksmith in astonishment.
“Well, making a jointed device was hardly an effort,” Berry said, running a hoof over the metal surface, though carefully removing her hoof before it got too near to Colgate’s. “A bit of work with springs and gears allow it to bend and move, without swaying about, but its unicorn magic that helps build it to do what you will need it for.”
Colgate bent the knee and peered into the surprisingly complex mechanism. “How did you make something like this so quickly?”
“You are too kind milady Chosen One.” Berry bowed her head. “Though this is not the first time I have made something like this before. My late husband had been wounded by a stray arrow while the unicorn tribe and earth pony tribes were driving out a group of savage slavers. I made him something similar to this, to help him walk again afterwards, as thanks for his service.” She sighed, looking at the leg and through it to some far off place and time only she could see. “I owe so much to that experimental device. My life here, my daughter and her place of honor and privilege at the Princess’s side…”
Clover tapped a hoof and coughed pointedly, causing Berry to start. “The Chosen One has much to do, Mrs Sledge.” The unicorn stated, giving the earth pony a pointed look.
Berry nodded. “I will need to fit your injured leg for a harness to hold the leg.” Berry explained, picking up a leather contraption with a metal cap slung in the middle of it. “The leg can then be socketed into it and removed at will.” She hoofed the harness to Colgate who draped it over her neck. “Once you have returned I shall try to have finished another gift, which I lacked the time to finish last night.”
“Cool,” Colgate said, hopping though the largest loop and proceeding to immediately tangle her good front leg. “Can I get a little help?” She asked plaintively, trying not to fall flat on her face.
Clover sighed in exasperation as she turned to the door. “Berry, see to the Chosen One. I will see to getting her supplies and a map.” And with that she was out the door, slamming it behind her with a bang. Colgate, startled by the noise, lost her balance and flopped to the floor. As she tried to disentangle herself, Colgate felt herself being helped up by the blacksmith.
“Here, let me set that properly for you,” Berry muttered, twisting the harness around Colgate’s body till the metal cap more closely aligned with her stump. The black smith pulled the cap up over Colgate’s stump, then tightened it till it was held firmly in place. Quickly, she picked up the leg and braced herself against Colgate and began to affix the leg to the cap. As she did so, Berry refused to look at Colgate, though she seemed more and more uncomfortable the longer they remained close. Eventually Colgate felt the awkwardness had reached a peak and broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Are you alright?”
Berry started guiltily and shook her head. “No milady! I mean yes milady, I am quite alright!” She hid her face from Colgate as she tightened the leg. “There is no reason why two grown mares should not be able to be close to one another without feeling anything strange or unnatural milady, so I don’t know why you would assume that they would!”
Colgate gave the suddenly flustered blacksmith a confused look. “So you’re ok then?”
“Should that word mean that I am not abnormal, then indeed!” Berry nodded quickly. “Though milady, I wish to ask…” She trailed off nervously.
Colgate stirred at the back of her head intently. “Ask away. I won’t get mad.”
Berry cleared her throat several times before taking hold of Colgate’s leg and giving it one final push into place. “Did you mean what you said about other mares?”
“Sure,” Colgate responded without hesitation. “I haven’t dated anypony in a good long while though. There was this one mare, a friend of mine, but she ended up with some jerk after I didn’t ask her out when I had the chance.” Colgate thought about it for a moment then amended, “OK maybe that’s not exactly how it happened, but it was sorta like that. Why do you ask?”
“Ideal curiosity!” Berry almost squeaked. “Well you had better go and save the world now, bye!” Before Colgate could protest she was shoved out of the shop and out into the court yard. Behind her the door of the shop slammed shut with a bang, leaving Colgate feeling extremely confused. Before she had a chance to sort out what had just happened she heard the door open again.
“You will return?” Berry asked; face an unreadable storm of emotions. “I will have something for you when you return, so you will come back, won’t you?”
Colgate nodded slowly, still feeling like there was something important she was missing.
Berry’s face suddenly flushed a deep scarlet and she slammed the door to her shop again, leaving Colgate feeling utterly lost. Soon Clover returned, carrying a pair of heavily leaden saddlebags. She looked from Colgate to the closed shop door in confusion.
“What happened while I was away?” She asked, passing Colgate the saddlebags.
Colgate picked them up with her new leg and slid them over her back, before shrugging. “I have no idea.”
“And you are sure that you understand?” Clover shifted her weight from one hoof to another. “Because I can go over the directions once more, if you desire it.”
Colgate rolled her eyes in exasperation. Clover had led her near to the edge of the dark and foreboding woods that marked the border of the forbidden area where the Necronomicon lay in wait. While Colgate had appreciated her company, the other unicorn had begun to grate on her nerves. She gave Clover a weary smile and nodded.
“I think I got the gist of it the fourth time you mentioned it,” Colgate confirmed, only letting a little bit of her frustration slip into her tone.
Clover frowned. “Chosen one, it is of the utmost importance that you take all of this very seriously!” she chided. “With the book safely in our hoofs we can end this curse and-“
“And send me back to my own time,” Colgate finished impatiently. “You sound like a broken record.”
“Pardon me?” Clover asked, confused as well as annoyed. “A what?”
“It’s something that repeats itself,” Colgate explained.
“Ah ha! Then surely you must admit that I am not a ‘broken record’ as if I were repeating myself I would not be broken,” Clover countered, grinning smugly.
“It only repeats when it’s broken,” Colgate growled, feeling the beginnings of a migraine building behind her eyes.
“Ah,” Clover relented. “Yet, regardless of what sort of record I resemble, I did not mean to cause you distress. I merely wish to leave as little to chance as possible.” She gave the forest a nervous look as she added. “I would join you in retrieving the book, but I fear I would not survive the journey.”
Colgate waved a hoof. “Don’t worry about it. I know you’re trying your best and I am grateful for the help, but you don’t need to stress out about any of this.” She trotted ahead toward the tree line as she called back over her shoulder. “Besides, last thing I want is for you to get eaten by a horrible tree monster and leave me stuck here with Princess kill-crazy!”
Clover grimaced as Colgate reached the tree line. “Do not forget the words you must speak before retrieving the book! Klaatu barada nikto! Do not forget!”
“Yeah, yeah I got it!” Colgate shouted back as she ducked into the forest. She dropped her voice into a low, mocking tone and added. “And don’t forget your scarf Colgate, you don’t want to catch a cold. Thanks mom.”
Colgate continued to mutter to herself as the air thickened, a heavy fog covering more and more of the landscape as she trudged ahead. Under hoof the forest floor became spongy as the thick layer of leaves hid the edge of some great bog. High above, perched upon the twisted branches of sickly trees, huge black birds stared down with cold eyes and cawed at the lone pony.
“Oh go shove a pie in it!” Colgate shouted, startling the crows from their roosts. As they flew away, she magically tossed a rock after them. “This place is creepy enough without you flying clichés cawing at me!”
Feeling slightly better, Colgate felt a spring return to her step. While her stay at the castle had, on the whole, not been that bad, she was starting to feel a little homesick. Now, with the book so close, for the first time since her life had taken a sharp turn into utter insanity, the thought of things returning to normal actually seemed somewhat plausible. Admittedly, a return to normality without Lyra in her life, but…
Colgate sighed, feeling the spring leave her step as suddenly as it had come. She had not had much of an opportunity to really think over the ramifications of her friend’s death before. as Between being dragged to her death in chains after being thrown through time and being lectured, she always had something pressing to keep her mind off of really thinking about what had happened in the cabin. Now though Colgate could not help but wonder what she was going to do with herself when she did get back. Colgate still had a few old college friends she occasionally spent time with, but with Cadence out of the country and Lyra dead, that mostly just left Twinkleshine and while Colgate would never say that Twinkleshine was a stuck up, obnoxious nag who she only was ever friends with because all her friends seemed to like her for whatever reason… Well she would not deny it if somepony were to make that observation.
Colgate had just begun to wonder if she could count that one friendly bartender as a friend and what it said about her that she was resorting to considering smiling servers friends when she was shaken from her train of thought by falling into a pool of bog water. She thrashed about in the water, shouting a string of profanities as she tried to get a firm hold of the relatively drier land of the bog. As she did so, an eerie silence fell across the bog, as the bugs and frogs and other wildlife suddenly quieted. As Colgate pulled herself onto the bank she strained her ears to hear the squelching of anypony, or anything moving throughout the bog. Her eyes darted to and fro, expecting to see waterlogged corpses shuffling toward her through the fog.
A full minute passed and Colgate had just about given up her watch when she heard a faint whistle off in the distance, growing louder. In the fog a dark shape, larger than anypony and high above the ground, began to emerge as Colgate felt her heart leap into her throat.
With a cry, Colgate pulled herself from the water and began to gallop as fast as her prosthetic leg and the marshy ground would allow her. Behind her the whistling rose, transforming into a howling scream as it grew closer. Just as it loomed over Colgate, ready to strike, the swampy ground rose up out of the bog and Colgate found herself once again on solid earth. Like a shot, Colgate dashed ahead, feeling the rush of air as the thing came down on the place she had been a moment before. Ahead, through the fog and atop a lonesome hill, a decrepit windmill came into view and Colgate turned toward it.
Even though her legs burned from exertion and her breath had started to come in ragged gasps, the last dozen yards to the top of the hill were still far faster than her flight through the marsh, so by the time she dove through the unbarred door of the old mill, she had just enough time to slam the door shut before the unspeakable thing crashed into the barrier with terrifying force. Colgate braced herself as a second battering-ram-like stick struck the door, the thing outside screaming in rage as it was denied entrance. For what felt like minutes Colgate leaned against the door, waiting for the next assault. Suddenly, from the walls came a horrific cry, like a filly screaming out for her mother. Colgate spun to face the sound, which rose in pitch as it raced along the walls of the mill, running higher and higher till it seemed to be running along the roof. And then silence.
Colgate stared at the place where the sound had disappeared as sweat began to form on her brow. Slowly, she began to look across the roof to a large hole, where a portion of the ceiling had collapsed in some time ago. Feeling her heart begin to beat hard against her chest, Colgate turned her gaze to the dark and foreboding ruin that was the interior of the mill.
Colgate cautiously stepped away from the door, giving it a sidelong glance as she prepared to throw herself back into it at the first sign of trouble, but the door stood still. Turning her attention to the interior of the mill Colgate felt a shiver run down her spine as she looked into the shadowy darkness all around her. Silhouetted against the beams of light, shining down from the holes in the roof, cogs and bars jutted out of the walls at strange angles, their purposes lost on Colgate’s frightened mind.
Shuffling under the archaic machinery, Colgate listened, darting her head back and forth. She felt her spine crawl as she jumped at every tiny noise she heard as her horn glowed to life, casting long shadows across the walls, which seemed much further away than they had before. From somewhere still hidden in darkness, a small voice began to titter. Colgate leapt away from the noise, smashing her head against a low hanging cog which protested with a crack that bounced off it as her vision spun.
Suddenly, movement caught Colgate’s eye as a flash of blue sparked in the darkness. With a shout Colgate vaulted a large bar and dove at the brightening blue light. In a flash, Colgate saw a blue unicorn diving back at her out of the blue, then her world was full of noise and flying glass as the other pony shattered against her. Colgate screamed as she landed heavily on the shards of the mirror, leaping back to all fours as fragments of mirror continued to cascade down around her.
“What is wrong with me!?” Colgate howled as she shook mirror shards from her mane, wincing as bits of crystal dislodged themselves from her legs and belly. “I mean, can’t the universe just give me a break for once?” She continued, carefully removing a stubborn piece of mirror that had managed to get itself embedded into her thigh.
Colgate twisted the large piece of mirror in her magic till she could see herself reflected in its surface. The disheveled, sodden and all around filthy mare reflected there looked less like the Colgate she knew and more a crazy, homeless pony. As a line of her own blood slowly ran down the reflection, distorting the image, Colgate tossed away the shard with a sigh.
“At least nothing cut me too badly,” Colgate muttered. “I guess there’s that.” She looked down at the broken mirror and at the tiny reflections of herself staring back up at her. Something in the tiny reflection caused her to laugh as she dropped it to the floor.
“Well that’s another seven years of bad luck.” Colgate raised her head and stared out the opening in the roof. “Which I guess is the cue for you to show back up, right?” She stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry at the night sky. “Go ahead! See if I care! Give me your best shoot!”
At that Colgate heard a soft giggling from the floor and sharply looked down. At first nothing seemed to be out of place; the mirror shards were still scattered across the floor, reflecting the moonlight glittering down from on high. But as she looked, Colgate began to notice one significant change to the pieces of mirror, namely that she was no longer reflected in them.
“Oh my goodness, no…” Colgate moaned in horror as she stared at her non-reflection in the mirror, tears beginning to well in her eyes. “You turned me into a vampire!” Colgate screamed, sitting down with a thump and holding her hooves over her eyes. “You monsters! You made me a nosferatu! Curse you!” She throw herself to the ground with a sob. “Curse you all to Tartarus!”
“Hey, haybrain!” A high-pitched voice shouted from somewhere above as Colgate began to wail. Instantly the weeping pony lurched back upright and began to search for the source of the noise.
“Who said that? Who’s there?” Colgate asked, seeing no other ponies around her.
“Right above you,” the voice replied, sounding as if it was trying to hold back laughter. As Colgate looked up she was immediately struck by a falling cog directly on the forehead. Colgate staggered back, crashing as the high-pitched voice began to laugh hysterically.
“You think that’s funny, huh?” Colgate snarled, shaking her head to clear it of stares. “Why don’t you come down here and I will give you something to laugh about!”
As if on cue, Colgate felt an unexpected sharp pain in her rear. With a yelp, she leapt forward, spinning around in time to catch sight of her assailants bumping their hoofs together in between bouts of uncontrollable giggles. Colgate’s jaw dropped as her brain tried to wrap itself around the fact that she had just been stabbed in the butt by a team of tiny… hers?
The miniature Colgates looked exactly like her in every way in every way, except for the fact that they were all only a few inches tall. As the tiny Colgates collapsed into a fit of laughter Colgate felt her head begin to feel woozy. She almost sat down, but stopped herself at the last second as she felt a twinge of pain from the thing still sticking out of her backside. With a whimper she pulled the thing free and looked at it, wincing at the sight of a bloodied fork.
“Where did they even find this?” Colgate wondered aloud, startling her miniature duplicates into jumping back up to all fours and making a break for it.
“Oh no you don’t!” Colgate shouted, hurling the fork at the clones as they scattered. One tiny pony, too slow or too startled to run, simply watched the oncoming utensil with unabashed terror. Colgate felt her stomach turn as the fork skewered the miniature creature, pinning it to the ground.
“Nooo!” One of the fellow tiny ponies screamed in its high-pitched voice as it ran back to its companion, who was struggling futilely with the fork. “What did you do to her!?” it wailed in a voice that Colgate realized was her own, several octaves higher.
“I’m so sorry!” Colgate winced, shuffling over the pair. “I didn’t mean to kill her, I just… just…”
“Just what?” the distraught pony howled, pointing at Colgate with a shaking hoof. “Just wanted to try and murder us unprovoked?”
“Hey!” Colgate cried, feeling her stomach turn as the tiny version of herself which she had impaled went limp, sagging into the utensil which had killed her. “You stabbed me first and I think you dropped a cog on my head!”
“And was that worth killing her over?” the miniature Colgate demanded, leaning over to look at something behind the large Colgate.
“No!” Colgate shouted, feeling tears begin to well up in her eyes. “That was just an accident! A horrible accident that never should have… Do you smell smoke?”
“No.” The clone shook her head.
“Me neither!” the skewered pony confirmed, giving Colgate an innocent smile before both tiny ponies began to giggle again.
Colgate spun around and screamed as she saw her tail merrily burning from the tip, where the scattered Colgates had been diligently working. Colgate began to spin in circles, desperately looking for a bucket of water to extinguish the flame with. Suddenly, Colgate felt something hard and long jut between her legs and she tumbled to the floor, landing on her burning tail. Screaming and flailing, the burning pony desperately rolled back and forth as her tail fire began to spread onto her fur. Meanwhile the clones began to choke as their laughter reached new heights, causing one who had hidden herself high above in the rafters to fall to her death, laughing all the way.
Finally Colgate managed to suffocate the flames, sighing with relief as she came to rest facing the clones. The three remaining little spawned monsters grinned at Colgate as she glared back.
“We want to apologize for setting you on fire,” one said, barely trying to pretend to be sincere.
“Oh yeah?” Colgate growled, horn glowing to life as she reached out for something to smash the demon with.
“Yep!” The clone nodded, trotting closer. “Cross my heart and hope to die-” Colgate lifted up a heavy cog, “-stick a horn right in your eye!” the clone shouted, charging forward and jabbing Colgate, who screamed and dropped the cog directly onto her own head. As she lay stunned, she felt her mouth forced open and something horrible and wriggling shoved past her lips. With a start her eyes shot open and looking down she saw the handle of the fork sticking out of her now closed mouth.
As the wriggling ceased, a memory of what had been on that fork hit her like a ton of bricks and Colgate began to gag violently, desperately trying to force the tiny monster out of her mouth. As she did so, however, the three remaining Colgates threw themselves against her lower jaw and nose, blocking off her air supply.
“Be a big girl and swallow your medicine,” one of the monsters chided giving Colgate a broad, killer smile. “Don’t want to make mommy mad, do you?”
Colgate, still mildly concussed from the multiple head injuries, struggled weakly as the thing in her mouth forced its way down her throat. Finally, running out of air drove Colgate to begin desperately trying to breathe in. Seeing that they had won, the remaining Colgates dashed away, laughing as they went, all while Colgate rasped in deep lung lungfuls of air, allowing the demon to slide the rest of the way down her throat.
For a while Colgate just sat and pulled herself back together, feeling her head for open wounds and testing her eye to see if she had gone partially blind. She had just about reassured herself that she was, in fact, more or less in one piece when her guts suddenly twisted in agonizing pain. Colgate bent double, retching as the pain rolled up her body and into her shoulder. She stared in abject horror as before her very eyes a small cut opened on her shoulder before widening to reveal a blue eye underneath. The eye rolled up to meet Colgate’s horrified stare.
Colgate screamed as she bolted for the door, stumbling over bits of machinery as she fled. Her shoulder throbbed as it bulged outward from her body, some hideous shape mutating out of her body like a growth. Colgate shoved her way through the door and collapsed to the ground with a cry of anguish as a fully formed head forced its way fully out onto a growing neck protruding from her body. Desperately, Colgate searched the ground for a stick and upon seeing one, grabbed it in her magic and prepared to attack.
“Wait!” The head screamed, holding out a hoof that was now growing grotesquely from Colgate’s side.
“What?” Colgate asked, feeling her stomach turn over as she realized her extra head was a mirror image of her own.
“This!” The head cackled, punching Colgate in her original nose. Colgate dropped the stick with a shout and clutched her nose. Unfortunately, this left her open as the mirrored head began to wail on the original with her new hoof, as a third back leg began to savagely kick her shins. Terrified and confused, Colgate rolled down the sloping hill and down toward the bog, all the while being battered by her strange new limbs.
As they slid to a stop at the edge of the bog, Colgate felt a wrenching from her side as the assault finally ended. Unsteadily, she pushed herself back to all fours and looked up at the thing that had been attacking her. A few feet away and looking just as confused as she was stood an almost perfect duplicate of herself, save for the flesh and blood leg where her mechanical one should be. She raised a hoof to her mouth and watched as the duplicate perfectly matched her movement, as if she were looking at a reflection of herself.
“What are you?”
The duplicate broke the mimic as it gave Colgate a crooked smirk. “Oh, isn’t it obvious? Never mind,” The mimic’s smirk grew into a sneer. “I forgot who I was talking too.”
“Hey!” Colgate snapped. “Don’t get smart with me you creepy eyeball mutant!”
“Oh I wouldn’t worry about me getting ‘smart’ with you, Colgate. I mean, after all, I am you...” The duplicate’s horn glowed to life with a faint blue aura as she spoke.
“Hey, cut that out!” Colgate shouted, feeling her cheeks burn. “Also what do you mean by, ‘you’re me’?”
The other Colgate laughed as she levitated a branch from the ground and began to pluck the twigs off it one at a time. “Oh I meant exactly what I said; I am you.” She plucked the last twig from the branch and rolled it around in her magic, examining it as she took a step closer to Colgate. “Well there is one key difference between us, I suppose…”
Colgate looked down at her twin’s leg. “The fact that you didn’t get bitten by a deadite or the fact that I was not born as an abomination of the laws of nature by crawling my way out of another pony’s side?”
The duplicate paused then shrugged. “Alright, you have me there I guess, but there is one other key difference between us.”
“The fact that you talk like a pretentious jerk?” Colgate asked, innocently.
The duplicate rolled its eyes and shook its head. “No, what I am trying to get at is that when I formed myself from your body, I left behind all your neuroses, your inhibitions and morals.” The duplicate broke into a wide grin. “Or to put it a way that you would understand, you’re ‘good’ Colgate…” Suddenly she swung the branch underhoofed, right under Colgate’s jaw. As the unicorn fell to the ground, the duplicate rushed forward, lashing out with the branch. “…While I am free to be bad Colgate!” she finished with a scream of delighted laughter.
Colgate crawled away from the villainous copy as she telekinetically reached out for anything that she could use to protect herself. As her mirror bore down on her again, she felt her magic wrap around the shaft of a spear. With a shout, Colgate wrenched the spear free where it lay half buried in mud and held it menacingly between herself and her clone. The other Colgate looked surprised as her predecessor pointed the mud-slick weapon at her, then her surprise gave way to amusement as she laid a hoof gently on the tip of the spear.
“Oh no!” the doppelganger mocked. “Whatever shall I do now that the big bad Chosen One has a weapon?”
Colgate tried to her best to look intimidating while lying flat on her back, slowly sinking into the mud. “Don’t push me,” she warned, dropping her voice as low as it would go and giving the tip of the spear a flick, knocking her mirror’s hoof away. “I don’t want to kill you, so let’s both just walk out of here alive. We are reasonable ponies, so let’s not do anything rash.”
The other Colgate snickered as she guided the spear’s tip toward her left eye. As Colgate blanched, her other self took the haft of the spear in her own magic and began to press it down into Colgate’s gut.
“Let’s face it dear,” the other Colgate snickered as she pushed down harder, causing Colgate to whimper in pain. “You don’t have it in you to hurt another living pony.” She pushed harder. “Because in the end, you’re just a pathetic little coward who let her friends die, who didn’t deserve to outlive Lyra,” She twisted the shaft, causing Colgate to cough as the air was pushed from her diaphragm. “And who is too much of a goody-goody to stop her better half from finishing what the stupid tree started!”
As the mirror Colgate drove down for one last push, she felt a sudden resistance as the spear shaft burned to life with a second blue magical aura. She looked down the shaft to see Colgate glaring back up at her, her face set and grim.
“I didn’t let my friends die,” Colgate snarled, as her horn flared to life, causing the spear to jut forward till its tip pressed against her copy’s eye. “And I’m not that good.”
Colgate squeezed her eyes shut as she rammed the spear forward.
Colgate sat on the banks of the bog and watched silently as the shaft of a spear slowly sank into the muddy water. She did not move as the shaft submerged with a small ripple, which quickly subsided as the water’s surface returned to a smooth, flat surface, as if nothing had disturbed it. For a while longer she stared at the pool, then she stood and wiped the tears from her face.
She climbed back to the top of the hill and looked down its opposite side, to the far off stone archway which lay just barely visible through the mist. She trotted down the hill and approached the arch warily. As she drew nearer to it, she began to see that the arch itself stood as the entrance through a low stone wall surrounding what looked uncomfortably like a graveyard.
“OK,” Colgate muttered to herself as she shuffled under the archway and into the graveyard, which stretched out in front of her as far as the eye could see. “If I was an evil book of the dead, living in an evil bog-forest-place, then I would definitely want to live in the creepy graveyard that just happens to be in the middle of an area that nopony ever goes to.”
She carefully weaved around the overgrown headstones as her teeth began to chatter. As she walked past stone mausoleums and plain, half-rotten wooden markers Colgate caught sight of a dark shape rising out of the mist. After a moment of trepidation she turned toward it and pushed ahead. As she neared the shape coalesced into a worn stone dais, leaning at a very slight angle to the gravestones surrounding it. Lying on top of the dais, she saw the dim outline of a book.
With a cry of joy, Colgate galloped ahead, feeling her mood soar as the object of her quest finally appeared in her sight. Before she had even reached the dais Colgate had grabbed the book firmly in her magic and pulled it to herself with an elated cry.
“I did it, I did it, I did it!” Colgate laughed as she threw herself onto the dais, holding the book to her chest and ignoring the disturbingly fleshy texture of the tome. She sighed, looking across the stone and suddenly felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. Across from her, looking as ugly and vial as ever, was the Necronomicon. From the corner of her eye she saw something that made her head swing to the side in a panic. A third copy of the book squatted evilly on its back, its human hide cover seeming to glare at her with the twisted face set into its cover. Colgate looked back at the book in her hoofs and felt her elation draining in a sensation that was becoming entirely too familiar for her likening.
“Clover never said anything about three books,” Colgate grouched. “What the heck am I going to do with three books?” As if in answer, the book in her hooves began to growl menacingly. Colgate quickly held the book out at legs length as it began to shutter and shake. “Alright, so just bringing them all back with me is out of the question then…”
The book jerked forward out of Colgate’s grasp with a snarl and latched onto her face. She screamed and beat at the tome as it madly snapped at her head, its foul-smelling pages mashing against her muzzle and eyes in a way rarely found in usually inanimate objects. Panicking, Colgate pulled back her hoof and swung with all her strength, hitting the book squarely on its cover. Unfortunately this had less of an effect on the book as it did on Colgate herself who staggered from the force of her own blow.
Finally, Colgate forced her hoofs under the book’s front and back and pried the terrible text off her face. The book snarled and snapped, but Colgate braced herself against its assault, unwilling to let the thing anywhere near her head again. Finally, the book gave out a defeated hiss and went limp in Colgate’s hoofs. Colgate eyed the book suspiciously for a few seconds, but when it failed to move again she cautiously relaxed her death grip on it. Still, she kept a watchful eye on the vile object as she placed it back into place on the dais.
“Alright then,” Colgate muttered, staring at the two other identical books sitting at equal distances from one another on the dais. Colgate circled the strange stone, looking from one tome to the other. “So which one of you is the real book?” she asked thoughtfully. The books remained unhelpfully silent. Colgate kneeled down next to one, then the other, carefully comparing the two for any discrepancies, but found none that she could see. Growing bolder, she prodded one of the books to see if it would spring to life and try to bite her, keeping a large branch at the ready just in case it did. Nothing happened. She repeated the experiment with the other book to an identical result. She even briefly considered doing the same thing again to the first book, but dropped it after a moment as being a profoundly stupid idea.
Finally running out of anything resembling a decent idea Colgate dropped her face onto the flat surface of the dais and groaned loudly. “That one!” She shouted, jamming a hoof in a random direction. She lifted her head slightly to see which book she was pointing at and groaned again when she realized that she was pointing to the first book. She slowly moved her hoof to the side till it was pointing at one of the untested books and repeated, “That one!”
Having thus deduced the most likely book Colgate tentatively flipped over the front over, beating stick once more magically held at the ready. When the book did not immediately lunge forward at her, Colgate nervously looked down at the first page and felt her jaw drop. Where she had expected to see lines of strange characters, written in the blood of near-mythical creatures, she instead found the edges of the page dripping down into a hole that seemed to reach down far further then the book should have allowed. At the bottom of the tunnel of liquid pages a strange, nearly hairless creature with an enormous chin stared back at her with an equally baffled expression on its bizarre face. The world around it was odd too, seeming… off in a way that Colgate could not put her hoof on, yet that made her feel very uncomfortable.
“What in Equestria?” she muttered.
“Well… That’s new,” the strange creature replied.
“What are you?” Colgate asked, feeling lightheaded.
“Who wants to know?” The strange thing shot back.
Colgate bristled at the weird thing’s rude tone. If it was going to go and break the rules of reality by existing in its strange world, it could at least have the decency to not be rude about it. “I’m Colgate. Now, what are you?”
The creature frowned, “So you’re a toothpaste, talking horse?”
Colgate blinked several times, “What? No! I mean, what does that even mean? What are you?”
The strange creature raised an eyebrow; “Weird.” Then it stepped back and closed the back cover of the book. As it did so, the tunnel of pages suddenly collapsed in on itself forcing Colgate back as the cover slammed shut on its own.
“What a jerk!” Colgate cursed, giving the book a dirty look. She considered reopening the book and giving the strange creature a piece of her mind, but then thought better of it, instead settling with just sticking her tongue out at the book and making an exceptionally rude sound. Having thus taken her vengeance, she turned her attention to the last book on the dais. “Well at least this narrows it down a bit.”
She reached out with her magic to retrieve the book, but just as she was about to lift it, a thought struck her. Colgate’s eyes widened as her mouth formed into a tiny o. “The words…” She looked back to the two previous books and bit her lower lip. “That might have helped.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead with a hoof. “I am so dumb sometimes…”
Colgate lifted her front hoofs up onto the dais, turned her head to the sky and intoned in her most commanding voice, “KLAATU!” She took a deep breath and thought back to what Clover had told her and continued, “BARADA!” She filled her lungs for a third time and closed her eyes as she shouted, “NECK...” She frowned. “Neck? No, no, no…” She opened her eyes and looked down at the book. “Nock?” She felt sweat begin to bead on her face as her mind went blank. “Nah… nah…. N something…” Colgate bent down and screwed her eyes shut, thinking as hard as she could as her whole body broke out into a cold sweat. “It’s an N word; I know it’s an N word.”
Colgate began to take deep breaths as voices inside her head began to scream at other voices to remember the word she had been told. In her mind’s eye she saw the horrible corpse of her doppelganger, rising from the bog, ruined face leering as it pointed a decaying hoof at her. “How could some pony who can’t even keep in mind one measly word ever save their friends?”
“Shut up!” Colgate screamed, smashing her metal hoof into the dais hard enough for the impact to send a flash of searing pain through her not-yet-fully-healed stump. Colgate yelped and cradled her leg as she collapsed onto the dais, crying. Her cries quickly tapered off to soft whimpers as she curled up next to the Necronomicon. “What am I going to do?” she sniffled, rubbing at her nose dejectedly.
“The same thing you did at university.”
Colgate lurched upright with a start and looked around. “Hello?” The voice had seemed so familiar, yet it could not be who Colgate thought it sounded like.
“Oh really? It can’t be?” the voice teased. and Colgate found herself staring at a very familiar face, details twisted into the cover of the very book she had come to retrieve.
“Lyra?” Colgate gasped, hardly believing her eyes. The face in the book twisted and turned till it looked like it was winking. “You better believe it, Cole!”
“But… but how? You’re, well, dead, for one thing; not to mention several thousand years in the future or something!” Colgate shot an accusatory glare at the image of her dead friend’s face set into the flesh covering of an age old tomb of pure evil. “How do you explain that, huh?”
Lyra’s eyes rolled as she grounded loudly. “Oh come on, Colgate. My soul got trapped in the Book, just like Derpy and Bonbon and Carrot Top. Until you can destroy the Book in the present, we are not exactly going anywhere anytime soon.”
“But, what about the whole time travel thing?” Colgate asked. She was starting to get a headache, something that always seemed to happen whenever she tried to read any story with time travel in it. Time Turner used to drive her mad talking about it when they were kids.
“Look, I know you have trouble with this stuff Colgate, so let me try and explain this as simply as I can,” Lyra soothed. “The Necronomicon is not bound by time, it exists at all moments of its physical existence simultaneously and so the ponies whose souls it swallows also exists at all those points in time as well. Get it?”
Colgate nodded slowly. “So it’s like that book you had me read at university?”
Lyra nodded as best she could. “Yes, just like that one you read half of and then threw out a window!”
Colgate blushed. “Oh… right.”
“Yeah, so maybe we should focus on getting you home and us freed from this book?” Lyra prodded.
“Right, yes let’s do that!” Colgate nodded vigorously, feeling giddiness begin to overtake her. “So what do I need to do to remember the word?”
“Same thing you did in university!” Lyra chirped. “Fake it!”
“Wait, what?” Colgate asked, her giddiness ebbing slightly.
“Fake it!” Lyra repeated, encouragingly. “You have most of the words, so if you just kind of fudge the last one a bit, then who is going to care that you didn’t say every single word exactly right? You’ll have mostly said them!”
Colgate scratched her chin as she considered this piece of advice as she tried to think of any time Lyra had ever steered her wrong on anything important before. Apart from the whole ‘trip of the damned’ thing, she could not and so Colgate nodded. “OK, let’s do this.”
Colgate once again placed her hoofs atop the dais and took a deep breath. “KLAATU! BARADA! NECatoro…” Colgate faded off the last word into a mumble as she pretended to cough. She cringed for a moment, sure that something horrible was going to happen, but when nothing did she let out a sigh of relief and picked up the book. Almost immediately Lyra began to laugh.
“Oh wow! I can’t believe you fell for that! How stupid are you even?”
Colgate felt a chill run down her back as several gravestones cracked and crumbled around her. “What is going on, Lyra?” She asked as her knees started to shake.
“Well since you misspoke the words, I guess that’s either an earthquake or just my army of darkness rising from their tombs to destroy the world of the living. Which do you think?” Lyra’s face twisted into a sneer as it looked up at Colgate.
“But, why would you do this to me?” Colgate asked, tears welling in her eyes.
“Wait, are you seriously not getting this?” Lyra asked, looking puzzled. “I am not your friend. I just used your own fears, hopes and memories to trick you into thinking that I was so you would free myself.”
“But then how did you know all that stuff about me?” Colgate wailed, holding the book out in front of her.
Lyra’s face took on a puzzled exasperation as it regarded Colgate. “Didn’t you hear me just say I was in your memories?” It regarded the blank look on Colgate’s face then groaned. “You know what? You stay here till the army rises; I am going to go get a better body. Then I am going to come back here, crack your head open, and see if you brain really is peanut sized.” And with that, the face on the book’s cover returned to normal, leaving Colgate speechless and gaping.
At that moment a bolt of lightning lanced down from the dark sky and blasted a tombstone apart, startling Colgate out of her shock. From the place where the lighting struck, a skeletal pony leg burst from the ground, soon joined by others from the nearby graves. As the dead began to dig themselves from their less-than-eternal resting places, Colgate bolted for the graveyard’s exit.
She had covered about half the distance in a matter of seconds, before a grasping hoof lurched out of the ground directly beneath her. Colgate tripped over the hoof, staggered to keep her balance, and was pleasantly surprised when she managed to stay on all four hoofs. Just as she was about to give herself a pat on the back for not face planting into at least one patch of dirt in Equestria, a boney hoof jutted out of the ground and hit her directly in the kidneys. With a whimper Colgate hobbled the rest of the way to the archway and out of the graveyard.
As she fled, she chanced one last look back and felt her blood run cold. From a hundred or more graves and monuments the skeletal remains of countless ponies tore their way free from the earth. Colgate bit her lip as she watched them.
“Clover is going to kill me for forgetting that last word,” she muttered before taking off again, as fast as she could manage.
As she galloped past the windmill a gurgling from the nearby bog caught her attention. Colgate hesitated as her curiosity and common sense battled with one another, before idiocy won out, as it had a tendency to do. She crept down to the edge of the nearest pool of water and looked across its bubbling surface, knowing what she would almost certainly find but needing to see it with her own two eyes. Sure enough, from the middle of the pool and coming closer was the head and shaft of a spear. She slowly backed away from the edge as the spear rose further out of the water till the top of a pony’s head broke the surface, the spear jutting obscenely from it like some grotesque second horn.
As the head came fully out of the water, the dead mare’s one remaining eye fixed onto Colgate. “You may have taken the book,” the dripping corpse of Colgate’s double growled, raising a hoof to point at Colgate. “But you will not escape us and you will not hide from us! The book will be ours!”
“Wait!” Colgate shouted, holding the book up above her head. “Can’t you just let me use it to go home? You can have it after that! I swear!”
The corpse laughed in the dry, maniacal way that is unique to a demonically possessed pony’s corpse. “You cowardly fool! Do you think that we would just let you go so easily?” Evil Colgate coughed up a bit of muddy water and took a second to recover before continuing. “If you gave us that book we would kill every pony in this land and then spread across the world so that when you arrived back home there would be nothing left for you but a blasted wasteland!”
“Oh,” Colgate said dejectedly. “Well I guess that makes sense, but I probably would have mentioned that whole thing after you had promised to help me, so that I couldn’t run away. So thanks for being honest at least.”
Evil Colgate’s eye twitched as she slowly sat back in the muck, an expression of dawning horror spreading across her face. “Oh horse apples…” she whispered.
Colgate coughed uneasily. “You didn’t think of that till just now, did you?”
Her evil doppelganger shot Colgate a murderous glare. “Well in my defense, I did just come back from the dead, at the bottom of a swamp, with a SPEAR IN MY BRAIN!” Her voice rising to a scream as she stamped a hoof into the mud.
Colgate began to back away from the pool again as she put up a warning hoof. “Well you did beat me up and I think you were planning on killing me, so…”
Evil Colgate took hold of the spear shaft and with a mighty yank, pulled the weapon from her skull. Pointing the blood, brain and water drenched spear at Colgate she bellowed, “Well now I am going to skin you alive and stick your head on the end of this thing and see how you like it!”
Colgate screamed and dashed off across the bog, not looking back as the litany of curses, threats and foul langue drudged from the deepest bowels of her memories slowly faded into the distance. She had barely slowed by the time she reached the forest and by the time she broke free from the tree line and once again saw Clover munching on her dinner, Colgate had just enough energy left to shout something even she could not understand and hold up the Necronomicon before she collapsed to the ground in a faint.
“Chosen One!” A voice shouted from where above Colgate’s head.
Colgate blinked as her exhausted body groaned in protest at being woken. Around her, a small crowd of anxious faces peered down at her frightened expression. As she stirred, the crowd gasped and pulled back as one.
“Chosen One you live!” Clover shouted and Colgate gasped as a purple blur shot from the crowd and hugged her tightly. “When you collapsed I had feared you may have died from exhaustion! I can hardly tell you how glad I am to see you still alive!”
“Feeling’s mutual,” Colgate wheezed as the other unicorn squeezed her. Hearing the tone of her voice, Clover quickly released her and took a step back, still looking ecstatically relieved. The other ponies, who had drawn back before, now also crowded in, adding their own well wishes and congratulations to Clover’s.
“I am also happy to see you are still with us, Chosen One,” a cold voice rang out, silencing the other ponies in an instant. From the direction of the keep Princess Platinum, flanked by her young squire, marched toward Colgate with a determined gait. The crowd parted as she drew closer, till she was close enough to whisper without Colgate missing a word. “For I would dearly love an explanation as to why your emergence from the forest, miraculous as that was in and of itself, seems to have coincided with… that.” The Princess pointed a hoof up toward the sky.
Colgate looked up toward the point indicated, but saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary. “What, the sky?” she asked tentatively, feeling like she was back in school, failing to answer a professors question when called on. “Is it not meant to be night right now?”
Princess Platinum snarled as she bent down over Colgate till their snouts were pressed up against one another. “Do not play games with me, Chosen One! I have little time and less patience for your yaps at this…” she trailed off as she seemed to notice something about the sky line. “Oh,” she muttered, face turning red.
“Um…” Colgate replied, feeling awkwardly torn between worry over the mental state of the Princess and consternation that her cheeks had started to glow red at her extreme proximity to the other mare face.
As the Princess lifted her head to get a better look at the skyline, Colgate’s thoughts involuntarily shifted toward an alternate scenario where the Princess’s attention had not been distracted and where she had gotten over whatever she was angry about and where-
Colgate’s train of thought was interrupted as the Princess and Clover suddenly lifted her up to a sitting position and pointed her toward the direction the Princess had been pointing before. Now, without the castle’s wall to block as much of her view, she could see the edges of a twisting mass of clouds, seeming to move alarmingly fast and in ways that no clouds should be able to without a team of specially trained pegasi coordinating them.
“What is that?” Colgate asked slowly as she felt her guts start to twist.
“That,” the Princess said, in a slightly calmer tone then before, “Is something I would very much hope you could tell us.”
“It did seem to start not long before you came running from the forest,” Clover added, starting to look a little nervous. “I will confess that I had questions of my own as to what had transpired when you were in there.”
“Oh,” Colgate said, biting her lower lip. “Well I just sort of went in there, got the book and came back out to you. No big deal or anything…”
Clover’s eyes widened as she stared at Colgate, then asked in a slightly trembling voice, “And the words? Did you say the words just as I told you?”
“Yes!” Colgate blurted, nodding emphatically. “I said the words, don’t worry about that!”
Clover relaxed slightly, but the Princess’s expression turned mistrustful. “And you are sure that you repeated the lines precisely as they were relayed to you?”
Colgate squirmed uneasily and scratched her belly with her good hoof. “Well, maybe not exactly, one-hundred-percent word for word, but the majority of them were definitely right…”
“What!?” Clover screeched, shoving the Princess aside as she grabbed Colgate and lifted her to eyelevel. Colgate flinched back from the wild-eyed mare as Clover peered into her eyes, as if looking for any sign that Colgate was lying. “Please tell me you did not retrieve the book from its accursed resting place without first reciting the proper incantation to render it inert!”
“Well, I mean, I did as long as that last word was not as important as the first two…” Colgate offered, trying and failing to smile reassuringly.
Clover screamed and shoved Colgate to the ground, shaking her violently as she began to rant. “You dung-headed, thick-skulled, perverse fool! You have doomed us all with your idiocy!”
“Clover, release her!” Princess Platinum bellowed, pulling the two mares apart and allowing Colgate to curl back into her accustomed fetal position. Clover spun to face her liege, tears running down her face and eyes still wide and panicked.
“Princess, you have no idea what she has done!” Clover made as if to lunge back at the shuttering blue mass of their chosen hero, but was held up by the Princess, who forced her back to face her.
“Well then darling,” Platinum’s voice dropped into a softer tone as she held her advisor at hoof’s length, “Why don’t you explain it to us?” she finished, making a small motion with her hoof to remind Clover of the dozens of ponies watching the scene from all around the courtyard.
Clover took a calming breath and nodded. “Yes Princess. I am sorry for that outburst.”
“That is quite alright my dear,” Platinum soothed, casting a calculating eye around the silent crowd. “Now, how much trouble are we in?” she prompted, adding in a much quieter voice, “And do feel free to spare on the details that might cause too much of a panic.”
Clover nodded firmly. “As you say, milady. The disturbance of the book without the proper protective measures put in place to prevent its power from spreading has allowed it’s power to speared at a horrific rate. I fear our previous study of the book may have created a small crack in its containment, which had allowed the current troubles.”
“Ah,” Platinum muttered. “That might make things rather awkward at the next meeting of the tribes.”
“Quite,” Clover agreed. “But that is nothing compared to what will happen now that it has been freed!”
“Wonderful,” Platinum sighed. “So how much worse will it get?”
Clover looked from the Princess to the book, still stuffed into Colgate’s traveling bag. “Given that that storm seems only to form above the forest, I suspect that its power will only have a limited reach. But even so, it could raise an army of monsters more than capable of breaching any stronghold we could keep the book in.”
“And what if it retrieves its… self?” Platinum asked, giving the ominous clouds an uneasy look.
“I dare not imagine,” Clover admitted. “I had hoped to have time to study the book and reverse the damage that had been done, but now…” She followed the Princess’s gaze out to the cloud, which had subtly grown even in the time they had been talking. “I fear we would need far more time then then we have with even the most generous of estimations.”
“I see.” Princess Platinum sighed and looked down at the book. “And if you left the protection of the castle with that book in order to flee, they would hunt you down without hope of protection. The roads have grown more and more dangerous as of late and I fear how much worse they will be when traveling with that beacon of evil in your possession.” She shook her head, “I suppose there is nothing left to do now but prepare for ourselves and hope to weather this storm as best we can.”
“Hold up!” Both unicorns turned to look at Colgate, who had partially pulled herself out of her fetal ball to look them in the eyes. “There is still something we can do!”
Clover’s lip curled up into a sneer as she spat on the ground next to Colgate. “I think you have done more than enough already, chosen one.”
The Princess nodded and waved to her guards. “Take this one to the dungeons where she can do no more harm.”
“What?” Colgate panicked, trying to scramble to her hooves as the guards rushed forward and grabbed her. “You’re making a mistake! I can still help!”
“Everypony else, prepare yourselves!” The Princess’s voice rose to a commanding shout as she began to direct her subjects. “There is a terrible evil coming! If we are to withstand it, we shall need every able-bodied pony to work toward the defense of this castle! Any who wish to join the guard should come forward as soon as possible for whatever training they can manage. Everypony else will need to gather what supplies can be brought into the castle in case of a long siege!” Platinum was distracted as a small hoof began to tug on her royal cape. Looking down she saw her young squire staring up at her with large, watery eyes. “What is it now?” she asked distractedly as she tried to ignore the filly to watch as her orders were carried out.
“Why don’t you let the Lady Chosen One help?” The filly asked, voice slightly trembling in the way that always seemed to herald trouble for the Princess.
“Because her incompetence may well have consigned us all to horrible deaths,” Clover snapped at the filly, who ignored her and continued to stare at the Princess.
“But if she can help, why not let her? She was nice to me and mommy and I don’t think she meant to con-something us to death!” The filly pouted as she gave the Princess a pleading look.
The Princess sighed and waved for the guards who had been dragging the kicking and screaming Colgate to stop. Seeing this, Clover’s mouth fell open and she pointed an accusatory hoof at the filly. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed. “You are not going to convince the Princess to forgo punishment by pouting at her!”
Platinum slowly rubbed her temples as she held up a hoof for silence. She looked down at Colgate and with a feeling of inevitable doom asked, “What, exactly do you think you can do to help?”
Colgate made a spirited attempt to dramatically pull herself away from her captors, failed, and instead settled for holding her head in as heroic a pose as she could manage. “I am going to ask for help.”
Princess Platinum blinked. “What?”
“I am going to go and ask for help,” Colgate repeated.
“From whom?” the Princess asked, feeling her headache growing more and more painful by the second.
“From the other ponies,” Colgate stated firmly, kicking a free hoof into the ground for emphasis.
“That would not be possible,” Platinum groaned. “Setting aside that Hurricane and Puddinghead have hardly ever been quick to jump to our aid at even the best of times, once they hear about the recent troubles being at least partially our fault, they will be more than happy to watch us burn.”
“Also not to mention that you ordered Commander Hurricane executed less than two days ago,” Clover muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
The Princess shot her advisor a dirty glare before concluding, “No, we shall reserve expect little help from the other tribes. The unicorns will stand alone as we have done throughout our history. It is only fitting that we should end that same illustrious history by doing what we have done for generations; all of the actual work with no thanks, while the other tribes sit around and complain!” The Princess’s voice rose to a proud cry as she raised a hoof to her chest and held her head high as if posing for a statue.
Colgate rolled her eyes as one of her captors wiped a tear from his face. “OK, fair,” Colgate conceded. “You made a few very good arguments and at least one super racist one, but I see your point. But do you want to hear my counter?”
The Princess raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Alright.” Colgate took a few seconds to think, then offered, “Well if I don’t try then we are all going to die, so why not at least give it a shot?”
The Princess looked from Colgate to her guards and finally to Clover, who shrugged.
“You make a fair point,” Platinum conceded. “I suppose at the very least this way you will not be eating rations in the dungeon that could instead be used to feed my people.”
“See! It’s a win-win all around!” Colgate shouted excitedly, trying to clap her hooves together, only to be thwarted by the unrelenting guards. “So maybe you could tell them to let me go?” Colgate asked sheepishly.
“Fine, let her go!” The Princess commanded. The guards dutifully dropped Colgate as they snapped to attention, saluting as Colgate landed spread-eagle on the ground.
“Ow,” Colgate groaned.
“Oh shush you,” Clover admonished as she stepped forward to help Colgate back to her hooves. “You’re going to need to hurry if your terrible plan is to have any chance of succeeding.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Colgate groaned. “I just woke up after running all day, so why don’t you cut me just a little slack?”
Clover frowned darkly as she began to repack Colgate’s dropped bags, making sure to remove the Necronomicon as she did so. “I shall cut you nothing till you have fixed the damage you have rendered by ignoring my repeated warnings!” she hissed, throwing the bags back over Colgate’s back and shoving her toward the gate.
“Wait, hold up!” Colgate protested, trying to slow the irate unicorn who was now pushing her through the yard. “I was going to talk to that nice blacksmith! Can’t I at least talk to the nice blacksmith and get that thing from her before I go?”
“No,” Clover snapped, and tossed Colgate through the portcullis. “Now if you hurry, you might just get back before the dead kill her and every other living pony I know!” Clover screamed as Colgate started to hurry down the road that led in the direction the pegasi had flown off before. “There’s a map in your pack, see if you can recall things that are actually written down!” Clover shouted before turning and stomping back into the castle.
“Well,” Colgate muttered as she galloped down the road, uncomfortably aware of the every looming cloud that seemed to now be moving steadily toward the castle. “At least it’s not raining.”
For the rest of the trip Colgate would periodically look up into the sky, mentally kicking herself for that jinx. Which was a shame; since apart from the vile cloud of darkness, it was an extremely pleasant and clear night.
As Colgate stared at the gated city, hanging precariously from the side of the great Canterlot Mountain, she felt her heart swell with a feeling she had trouble putting a hoof on. From its stone spires and simple yet sturdy foundations, which allowed the city to expand outward into the cloudless sky, there could be no mistaking the iconic place. Canterlot. Her home and future seat of Equestrian power, now little more than a construction site.
“Sort of disappointing,” Colgate shrugged, finally placing the feeling.
The armored earth pony who had accompanied her from the front gate shot her an offended stare. “I beg your pardon?”
Colgate shrugged again. “Oh you know, it’s sort of cool I guess, but it’s like seeing a new restaurant before it’s finished. You just wish it was done already so you could enjoy it, you know?”
The earth pony snorted. “I will send along your impatience to the builders.”
“Oh, thanks!” Colgate smiled, too tired from her long day to bother worrying about whether or not the guard was being sarcastic.
The earth pony shook his head, muttering something under his breath that Colgate could not hear before pointing to a large, elaborately decorated tent. “If you want to speak to the tribe representatives, then you will meet them there. Though I warn you, they will not be best pleased to see that Princess Platinum has not come herself to speak on behalf of her ponies.”
“Right, right.” Colgate waved off his words with a dismissive gesture. “Thanks for all your help and all, but I got this from here”
“As you say, milady,” the stallion said, bowing before turning to return to his post.
“You know, I could get used to ponies calling me ‘my lady’,” Colgate mused as she ducked under the propped-open flap of the great tent. Inside, illuminated by flickering torches and standing around a large wooden table, a small group of earth ponies and pegasi were engaged in a heated debate.
“Your refusal to help is tantamount to a pardon for their crimes!” Commander Hurricane slammed her hoof onto the central table with enough force to make the ponies around her flinch back. “You cannot hide behind the excuse of neutrality when they have already broken the treaty that we all agreed to!”
Across the table an orange earth pony met the furious pegasi’s stare with her own, unflinching even as the ponies around her began to mutter amongst themselves. “Askin’ for a small grace period to verify yer accusations is hardly oath breakin’ and I would ask ya to think carefully before ya start making declarations yer likely to regret in time.” She held Hurricane’s gaze for awhile longer till the Commander blinked, allowing her glare to lessen slightly. The orange mare smiled as she added, “Let us not allow rash words n’ rash actions to lead us astray tonight.”
“I verily agree with Smart Cookie!” A pink mare dressed in lavish clothes and wearing a large brown hat suddenly screamed, bouncing up onto the tips of her hoofs. “I also verily think that we should acknowledge Colgate, since she just got here!”
“I, uh, don’t think that’s what verily means,” Colgate offered as every pony in the room turned to stare at her, a mix of curious and suspicious expressions on almost every face.
“You’re just jealous because you don’t get to talk in a funny accent!” The pink mare chirped.
“Right, because those have been so consistent so far…” Colgate muttered, rolling her eyes.
“Sorry, what was that?” Smart Cookie asked, giving Colgate a warning look.
“Uh,” Colgate stammered, blushing and looking directly at a point off to her right. “I mean, hello, my name is Colgate and I am here on behalf of the unicorn tribe with terrible news!”
“And why has Princess Platinum not come herself?” Commander Hurricane asked, rising into the air as she pointed an accusing hoof at Colgate. “Does she intend to insult this council, sending an unremarkable lackey to speak on her behalf? Or is she simply too scared to come here and face justice for her crimes?”
A familiar yellow pegasi, who had till this point been standing behind the commander quietly trying to stay out of sight of the other ponies, reached up and tugged on her commanding officer’s leg. “Um, miss?”
“What is it Private Pansy?” Hurricane asked irritably.
“Miss, this is the unicorn who let us free back at the castle,” Pansy replied, giving Colgate a nervous smile. Commander Hurricane looked from Pansy to Colgate in confusion before her eyes widened in recognition. Before Colgate could react, she found herself lifted into the air, grasped in a tight embrace by the armored pegasi leader.
“It is you!” Hurricane cried as she squeezed the air from Colgate’s lungs. “I did not recognize you! And to think I was about to order your death!”
“Glerb!” Colgate managed as her face turned a darker shade of blue. Hearing this Hurricane laughed, dropping Colgate back to the ground where she collapsed in a heap.
“My apologies strange one! I have never been one for half measures, though you seem tired and… maimed.” She gave Colgate’s metal leg an appraising look. “I will have the servants bring you refreshments and you will sit by me till my business here is adjourned.” She whistled and several pegasi hurried out of the tent.
Smart Cookie coughed politely. “I believe yer guest had something to convey before ya assaulted her. Something in regards to our missing tribe, perhaps?”
Colgate nodded as she crawled tiredly onto an unoccupied chair. She took a moment to catch her breath as one of the servants returned with a full cup that smelled strongly of her last Friday night. She grimaced and drained the cup in a gulp, pushing it back to the concerned servant as she looked to Smart Cookie and her pink companion.
“I am afraid I have bad news,” Colgate began, feeling the contents of the cup rush to her head. “So you all, you know, know about the whole…” Colgate tapped a hoof on the ground as another cup was placed in front of her. “Uh, dead ponies coming back to life and killing the living ponies thing, right?”
Smart Cookie nodded slowly, looking less than impressed. Colgate felt herself start to sweat as she picked up the new cup and took a long sip of its contents. She felt her vision begin to swim slightly and closed her eyes as she continued. “Right. Well, uh, the unicorns have, um… Well we, or they, or whatever- we figured out where they were coming from!”
“It is the work of the Necronomicon!” a large and grizzled looking earth pony interjected, looking impatient. “You unicorns told us that last time and it was hardly any great surprise then, either! Or have you come to confirm that you are responsible for all of this with your cursed meddling?”
“Chairpony, please!” Smart Cookie snapped, not taking her eyes off of Colgate. “Let’s not sink to bickering just yet, if ya would be so kind.” She nodded. “Now miss, continue.”
Colgate flushed as nodded emphatically. “Right! So, right, the Necronomicon is evil, blah, blah, blah, we took the book to find a reversal spell to stop all this and now there is an army of evil dead ponies coming to get the book back from the unicorns and kill everything,” Colgate rambled as she blinked rapidly, trying to keep her eyes open as the world started to spin around her.
“What!?” Smart Cookie leapt to her hoofs as several other ponies around the hall did the same. “By the love of the land! Why didn’t ya tell us this from the start?”
Colgate attempted to match her dramatic rise, but felt the world pitch forward as she slid face-first onto the council table. As she began to droll into the polished wood, the thought of how ridiculous she must look at that moment suddenly dawned on Colgate and she began to giggle uncontrollably.
“How much did she drink?” Smart Cookie growled as she watched Colgate begin to slide back off of the table, leading a trail of saliva with her.
“Only two cups, I am sure,” Commander Hurricane answered, consternation and bemusement combining on her face to make a singularly comedic expression. “Though I cannot say whether she has had much to eat since her arrival.”
Private Pansy gently helped Colgate finish her decent somewhat gracefully as the chosen one peered at her through one half-lidded eye. Pansy gave the other pony a reassuring smile as she laid Colgate’s head on the floor. “There you are,” she cooed. “You look utterly exhausted. Did you have to travel far to reach us?”
Colgate nodded. “And almost nothing to eat since breakfast.”
“What!?” Pansy looked shocked as she waved for a servant holding a tray of food over to them. “Why would you do that?”
“Not really had much time to spare,” Colgate muttered, eyes closing as her breathing began to even out.
“Well you should get some rest now and I will make sure you have plenty to eat tomorrow.” Pansy waited a few seconds for Colgate to respond, but the unicorn had already drifted away into sleep. She looked to the servant with the food tray. “Take her to our quarters and watch to make sure she does not vomit and drown in her sleep.”
The servant nodded and lifted Colgate, dragging her out of the tent as Commander Hurricane gave Smart Cookie a triumphant smile. “Well then, it seems that settles it then, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does!” the pink mare shouted suddenly, startling Smart Cookie. “Wait…” She blinked several times before giving Hurricane a confused look. “What does it settle?”
The Commander’s smile grew as she rested a hoof on the table. “It means, my dear Chancellor Puddinghead, that my motion to raise our forces to move on the unicorn tribe has just been passed.”
“Now wait just a second there!” Smart Cookie snarled as she glared at Hurricane. “I agree that we need to move to investigate these claims of an army of the dead n’ that swift action must be undertaken if there is any chance her claims are grounded, but that is not the same as givin’ ya permission to take vengeance on Princess Platinum! Especially if there is an army already marching in on her!”
Commander Hurricane nodded, still smiling. “As you say, advisor. I shall muster my forces and meet your own here, at Mount Canterlot. From there we will travel together, to insure that there all is done properly. Should we find an army there already attacking the good Princess, then we shall do our utmost to aid our sisters in their hour of need. And if this is merely a ruse on the part of the Princess…” Hurricane raised an eyebrow at Smart Cookie, “Then you will see firsthoof that my claims of mistreatment were not unfounded.”
Smart Cookie scowled back at her. “And how do I trust that ya will not just delay us till our help comes too late?”
Commander Hurricane’s eyes flashed in anger as her lip curled. “I would hope my word would be enough for you, but if it is not, then I will send a detachment of my own honor guard to send word to Princess Platinum and aid in her defense. I trust that you would not insult me by claiming I would allow my own ponies to die needlessly, would you?” Hurricane grabbed Private Pansy, would have who had just rejoined her, and pulled her in close. “And as a sign of good faith, I will have my good right wing join them as well as my dear friend, Lady Colgate join them. Let their lives be proof that I will not allow everypony in that castle to die horribly for vengeance’s sake!”
“What?” Pansy squeaked, looking horrified.
“Well then Smart Cookie is going too!” Puddinghead shouted, jumping up onto the table and throwing her hat at her hoofs. “As well as a regiment of my own best house guard!”
“Excuse me, hold up?” Smart Cookie asked, turning slightly green as she looked up at her lady.
“Then it is settled!” Commander Hurricane barked, ignoring both Pansy and Smart Cookie.
“Yes!” Puddinghead agreed, picking up her hat and placing it back on her head.
“But-!” Smart Cookie and Private Pansy interjected at the same time.
“Enough!” Commander Hurricane ordered as she stomped a hoof on the table. “This meeting is adjourned! We will shall return to our homes to gather our forces and return here as swiftly as possible to prepare for battle. The detachments will leave at sunrise to await our arrival at the castle.”
“Oh!” Puddinghead clapped her hoofs together. “This is going to be so exciting!”
Smart Cookie and Pansy just looked at one another, expressions of apprehension and defeat mirrored on one another’s faces.
Colgate’s stomach growled as she yawned loudly, stretching her sore legs. She opened her eyes and blinked in the near total darkness. Feeling her stomach growl again she groaned and rolled out of bed. The sun had not even come up yet, but with the way she felt there was no way she would be able to fall back to sleep before she had gotten something to eat.
In the darkness, without even enough strength to call up magic to light her horn, Colgate was blind save for a flickering light shining through the crack of what she assumed was the door. As she reached the light she leaned forward, intending to lean against the door for support before calling for one of the servants.
Colgate flopped through the tent flap with a resigned moan, startling the pegasi who had been standing guard. The young stallion sprang to attention as he saw Colgate feebly hanging on the tent flap, face pale in the torchlight.
“Ma’am, do you require assistance?” the guard asked, looking straight ahead. Whether out of some form of military discipline or to avoid staring at Colgate neither knew nor cared.
“Food,” Colgate croaked.
“Yes ma’am!” the guard acknowledged, rushing off as Colgate righted herself long enough to lean against a half-finished wall. Looking up, she stared at the moon, which hung high above the world, bright and beautiful and-
“Wait a minute… That can’t be right…” Colgate said out loud as she frowned at the night sky. “How is it still midnight?”
“We were wondering the same thing,” a voice replied from behind. Colgate turned to see Smart Cookie and Private Pansy approaching her, worried looks on both their faces. “Because it’s been like that for at least the last eight hours.”
“What?” Colgate looked aghast as she stared at Smart Cookie. “How is that possible?”
“Well,” Private Pansy offered, “If the unicorns are truly in danger, then it could be that-“
“Ma’am!” Pansy was cut off as the young guard returned, holding a tray of hay. “My apologies ma’am, but this was all the cooks had on short notice and you did not sound like you wanted to wait for a prepared meal.”
Colgate held up a hoof to Pansy. “Hold that thought,” she requested before grabbing as much hay off the tray as she could and shoving it into her mouth. The guard laid down the tray, looking slightly revolted as Colgate noisily shoved more and more of the food into her mouth. Private Pansy and Smart Cookie exchanged concerned looks as the chosen one dispensed with hooves and shoved her face into the hay, munching away greedily and disregarding any and all sense of decorum.
After several prolonged minutes of hedonistic debauchery Colgate let out a satisfied sigh and pushed herself back to her hoofs, wiping bits of food from her face as she did so. “Please, continue,” she urged Private Pansy with a warm smile. Pansy looked unsure, but complied.
“Um, well, I was just going to say that if the unicorn tribe is in trouble, they might not be able to raise the sun and moon properly.” Pansy looked up at the moon, her brow creased with worry. “But something like that has not happened in generations! Even during the migration from the homelands they never abandoned their duties.”
“I imagine it could also be a cry for help,” Smart Cookie added grimly. “Somethin’ like this could be seen as an act o’ war. Without days and nights, we can’t grow the crops that feed all three tribes, so we earth ponies and pegasi would have no choice, but ta come and see what was goin’ on with the unicorns.”
Private Pansy chewed her lip. “They would have to be so desperate to do something like that.” She looked at Colgate, as if looking for confirmation. Colgate just nodded.
Smart Cookie shook her head. “Well that settles it then, we don’t have a minute ta waste!” She tilted her head back and in a voice that boomed across the darkened town shouted, “Saddle up n’ move out!”
“What she said,” Private Pansy added in a much quieter voice, flying off into the camp to rally her own troops.
As Smart Cookie took off to prepare, Colgate tailed after her, fidgeting as she did so. After a short while Smart Cookie sighed and turned to the other mare. “What do you want?” she asked, trying to keep the irritation from her voice.
“Where are you going?” Colgate asked innocently.
“Ta get my things,” Smart Cookie answered shortly.
“Will that include putting on armor?” Colgate asked, failing to hide her smile. “Like knight’s armor?”
“Well…” Colgate said, starting to blush a little bit. “Since we are going into battle and all I was thinking that maybe, since I don’t have any armor, maybe I could borrow some?”
Smart Cookie stared at Colgate incredulously. “You want ta wear full plate armor.” She looked at Colgate’s three remaining legs and the near total lack of visible muscle on them. “Do you have any idea how much that weighs?”
“Nope,” Colgate replied truthfully.
Smart Cookie smiled incredulously at the unicorn as she nodded. “Alright then,” she agreed. “How about we suit you up and if you still want ta wear it into battle by the time we arrive at the castle, then you can be my guest.”
“Cool! Thanks!” Colgate grinned. This strange eternal night- day- thing was so far turning out alright for her.
* * *
“This was a bad idea!” Colgate whined as she wiped sweat from her eyes for what felt like the thousandth time since they had started the march. The inside of the armor had already turned into a bath of her own sweat as the leather and metal held in the heat of the warm night and amplified it with her own body heat. If not for the fact that she had not worn the helmet, she was sure she would have died from heatstroke already.
“More water?” Private Pansy offered, passing Colgate a cloth sack. As Colgate gratefully took it and began to drink, Pansy patted her on the head. “I am sorry about all of this, but we are almost there now and then we will have the time to get you out of that nasty thing.”
“Good,” Colgate grouched, giving Smart Cookie, who was near the front of the small force, a venomous glare. “I won’t want to keep Smart...” Colgate hesitated.
“Cookie?” Pansy offered.
“No, no.” Colgate shook her head. “I am trying to think of something clever and mean to replace the word Cookie with.”
“Ass?” One of the pegasi guards offered.
“Hey!” Colgate glared at the guard. “Don’t you start judging me now!”
“But-”
“OK, wow!” Colgate cut her off. “If you are just going to keep insulting me, then how about you just keep your opinions to yourself, alright?”
The poor guard looked at her fellow soldiers for support, but just found rolling eyes and shaking heads. She sighed, “Yes ma’am.”
“Hold up!” Smart Cookie shouted, holding up a hoof as the force slowed to a halt behind her. Colgate looked around at the rolling countryside around her and could not help but notice the distinct lack of any sort of castle or army of undead monsters. She trotted up past the ranks, Private Pansy by her side, till she had caught up with Smart Cookie, who in turn was talking to a large stallion covered head to hoof in heavy plate armor.
“What’s going on?” Colgate asked, self-consciously trying not to slouch under the weight of her armor in the presence of the metal-clad giant. “Why did we stop?”
Smart Cookie’s mouth twitched as she tried hard to hide the edges of a smile forming on her lips at Colgate’s tired and sweaty face. “Ah, chosen one. I see you’re accommodating ta that armor well.” She covered her mouth with a hoof and made a sound more like a stifled laugh then a cough. “It looks good on you.”
Colgate’s face burned as she glared at the earth pony mare. “Bite me and my heavy metal butt,” she snarled. “Now are you going to tell me why we are stopping or not?”
Smart Cookie looked as if she was on the verge of bursting into laughter, but managed to keep herself together long enough to nod.
“And…?” Colgate asked, feeling her face burn even hotter.
Smart Cookie took a deep breath and calmed herself, though she still looked overly amused with Colgate’s situation. “Scouting,” she finally said.
“Scouting?” Colgate repeated, looking from Smart Cookie to the hulk besides her. “Who, him? Seriously?”
“Verily,” the huge pony drawled, unmoving.
Smart Cookie gave the big stallion an affectionate look and confirmed, “Sir Macintosh may not look it, but you will never find another stallion as quiet as he is.”
“Right,” Colgate said, disbelief etched on her face. “So why do we need to scout anyway? There is a castle. There are a bunch of dead ponies trying to get into it. What else do we need to know?”
Smart Cookie sighed in exasperation as the large stallion trotted off down the path. “Because we don’t know if there are any ambushes waitin’ for us on the road or what side this army is attackin’ from or if we can get close enough ta make it inside before they spot us. Heck, for all we know this army of yours might not even be there yet and we can just waltz on in, clean as you like.”
“OK, OK!” Colgate put up her hoofs in surrender. “I get it. So what do we do till he gets back?” She reached up and began fumbling for one of the straps holding the her armor in place. “Because since we’ve stopped, we might as well take a break, right?”
“Wrong,” Smart Cookie replied with a small smile. “We push on, just a bit slower. No point in wasting time if all is well. And if not, Sir Macintosh will bring us word in time to prepare.”
“Great,” Colgate muttered, letting go of the strap and falling back as the detachment set off again. From high above, the swirling clouds high above began to drizzle a light rain onto the ponies’ heads. “Just great,” Colgate repeated bitterly.
Private Pansy nudged her despondent friend and smiled. “Well, look on the bright side,” she consoled, “At least the rain will cool you and that armor can hardly be much heavier around your neck than the chains, right?” She giggled and added, “All things considered, this second trip to the castle is far more pleasant than our earlier one!”
Colgate didn’t reply, but merely gave Pansy a longsuffering look.
“Give it half an hour,” she sighed.
As if determined to prove Colgate wrong, the universe maliciously waited almost a full forty-five minutes before the drizzling rain had intensified into a downpour. The dirt roads quickly turned into rivers of mud, slowing the company’s march to a crawl. The rain filled the boots of the knights with mud and grounded the pegasi, who cursed the out-of-control weather with language colorful enough to cause poor Private Pansy to turn scarlet.
Eventually a lone figure emerged from the rain, water running down his metal plates like tiny waterfalls. He strode through the thick mud effortlessly till he had come face to face with Smart Cookie. Once again, Colgate and Pansy hurried to the front to see what Sir Macintosh had discovered.
“Very well,” Smart Cookie sighed as the great stallion bowed his head. “I cannot say that this news pleases me any, but it is as we suspected.”
“What’s up?” Colgate asked, wiping her bedraggled mane from her face as she looked at Smart Cookie, unintentionally smearing her forehead with mud as she did so. “You look sorta down. Something happen?”
“Indeed.” Smart Cookie nodded. “Sir Macintosh informs me that yer claims were not unfounded.”
Colgate craned her neck into the crook of her left foreleg and began vigorously attempting to wipe as much mud from her face as she could, pausing only briefly to reply to Smart Cookie. “What, didn’t you believe me?” She looked up at Pansy and added, “Hey, can I borrow you for a second?”
Smart Cookie rolled her eyes as Colgate wiped the mud off one of her hoofs, using a mortified Private Pansy as a makeshift towel. “It is not that I had doubted yer sincerity, Chosen One, just that I had hoped yer predictions had been less accurate.”
“Thanks,” Colgate said, wiping the mud from her face as Private Pansy rubbed at the slick mud now smeared across her body. Turning her attention back to Smart Cookie, Colgate asked, “How do you mean?”
“I mean that yer assessment of the danger posed to the Unicorns was not exaggerated,” Smart Cookie replied. “Their castle has been surrounded by the forces of the dead n’ will likely fall well before our reinforcing armies will arrive.”
Colgate took a second to register what the earth pony was saying, but as it did her face began to pale.
“Oh,” she muttered weakly, looking as if somepony had just struck her.
“Oh indeed,” Smart Cookie agreed; face setting into an expression of grim determination. “It is good that you came when ya did, as we are now the only hope for the Unicorn Tribe’s survival.”
Colgate nodded slowly. “OK so we try and bust through, then help them hold out till the reinforcements come, right?” She nodded faster. “Yeah, OK. I mean, I wanted to just get in there first and maybe try and ride things out safely, but we can do it like that.”
Smart Cookie shook her head. “I fear things are not so simple. The army surroundin’ the castle is large and fearsome and we have neither the strength, nor I fear even morale ta fight through their ranks to reach the castle without being slaughtered.”
Colgate shifted uncomfortably. “Alright so what, then? If we can’t fight them and we can’t let them just do their thing till our friends show up, then what?”
“I was hoping you might have that answer,” Smart Cookie replied dryly.
“What?” Colgate stammered, looking at Smart Cookie like she had just suggested fighting the forces of darkness with a musical number. “You’re joking, right? I mean, I doubt there is anypony here less qualified than me to come up with a plan!”
“Actually…” Pansy interjected, wiping the last of the mud from her coat. “You are the Chosen One, so isn’t it your destiny to do that? To save us from the terror of the deadites, right?”
“What?” Colgate looked appalled as Smart Cookie nodded in agreement with Private Pansy. “But that’s ridiculous!” She looked back at the guard ponies who had slowly gathered around to watch and were now also murmuring their approval. “This is insane! I don’t know the first thing about tactics!”
“But if you are fated to do something, does that even matter?” somepony asked philosophically.
“YES!” Colgate shouted at the stallion. “Because it even if some old crazy wrote down some crazy, stupid, vague thing about somepony at some point falling out of the sky, that does not mean that everything that pony does will magically turn out alright no matter what because that same vague old pony said it would!”
“But isn’t that how prophecies work?” Private Pansy asked.
“Yes, but prophecies are dumb!” Colgate snapped. “I mean, if I was so important to all of that, then why wouldn’t the army be just as focused on getting me as in getting the book back, huh? I mean, if I am supposed to be the one pony that can stop them, then why don’t I just go out there and shout, ‘Hey everypony! Look! It’s me, the Chosen One! Why don’t you come and get me and leave the castle alone long enough to let my plans in, since apparently I am the one that is going to screw up all your stupid plans?!’ I mean, really!”
There was a silence as everypony stared at Colgate, whose face suddenly went very pale.
“Oh you all suck,” she moaned as Private Pansy gave her a comforting hug.
“And there ya have it.” Smart Cookie smiled. “Truly fate has chosen a perfect instrument for its champion.” She raised her voice to address the other ponies. “You have heard the Chosen One’s plan, so do not tarry! Once the Chosen One has created her distraction, then we must move with haste ta reach the castle before the forces of darkness have had a chance ta kill her and for form their siege line.”
“Can I come up with another plan, please?” Colgate asked pleadingly.
“No time,” Smart Cookie replied. “Yer current one should work fine and will- with a bit of luck- give the castle the edge it needs to survive the siege.” She clapped Colgate on the back and gave her a warm, genuine smile. “It is a rare thing ta be able ta turn the tide of history and save the entire world with but a single life. I envy you that honor in a way.”
“You can have the honor if you want?” Colgate said quickly, but Smart Cookie simply laughed and donned her helmet.
“If the choice was mine, I would!” Smart Cookie shouted as she began to lead the company down the road. “But we all have our parts to play and that one is yours.”
Colgate worked her mouth, but no words came out. Sensing her friend’s distress, Private Pansy gave Colgate another tight hug. “It’s alright,” she cooed. “If not for you, I would have died in that horrible pit, so if you want I can stay with you now.”
Colgate looked at Pansy with tears in her eyes and nodded. “Thank you,” she choked out.
“You’re welcome,” Pansy soothed, and began to lead Colgate once more down the road to the castle and once again toward both of their deaths.
Smart Cookie stood stock-still as the rain ran in rivulets off the brim of her hat. Beside her, pegasi and earth ponies clad in full armor held themselves low, waiting on the signal to break free from the forest’s edge and toward the great stone castle less than four hundred feet from where they held. Between them and the fortress, hundreds of skeletal ponies assembled ladders, prepped catapults and carved logs into battering rams. At the center of the monstrous army, a lone pony- wearing the rusted armor of some long-dead unicorn queen- sat and watched the preparation, its hoof tapping impatiently.
Suddenly a bolt of magical energy lanced out of the woods, far from the position of the soldiers and struck the armored pony, sending it toppling gracelessly head over hooves. As the armored pony untangled herself from her cloak she began to bellow orders.
“KILL HER!” the raspy, yet still recognizable voice of the chosen one boomed from the armored figure, causing Smart Cookie’s mane to prickle. “The book will wait, but if she gets away I’ll be grinding your miserable bones into something worse than bread!”
From the woods the almost identical voice of the Chosen One replied, “Oh right, because you did such a good job catching me back at the graveyard!” A second bolt of magic shot straight over the armored pony’s head, missing by mere feet.
“Oh that is it!” The armored pony’s horn glowed with a blue aura so dark it was almost black and drew a strange-looking spear from the pony’s side. “Come on! Catch her, hold her down and then wait for me! I am going to enjoy returning this to you, Chosen One…”
Smart Cookie watched as a third of the army split off and charged after the retreating taunts of the Chosen One. As they disappeared from sight, Smart Cookie and her forces rose. With a cry, the pegasi burst from the trees, startling the still-somewhat-confused dead. As the skeletal force quickly began to reform to deal with the unexpected aerial threat, Smart Cookie leapt from cover and charged the weakest point in the besieger’s lines.
Reeling at the sudden rapid changes and without their leader to guide them, the slow-moving corpses desperately regrouped behind the new arrivals. As they refortified their blockade the company of well-armed ponies slipped under the portcullis gate and into the castle proper.
Inside, Smart Cookie removed her helmet, breathing a sigh of relief as she slowly processed the fact that she had made it in alive and with few casualties in either of her forces’ ranks. She sat down on the dirty courtyard floor as Princess Platinum and Clover the Clever hurried towards her, looks of confusion and joy evident on both unicorns faces.
“Smart Cookie!” Clover shouted, throwing her legs forelegs around Smart Cookie’s neck and embracing her tightly. “You have no idea how pleased I am to see you at this time!”
Smart Cookie returned the hug. “We had heard of yer situation for the Chosen One, though we did not suspect how badly ya might be suffering till the moon failed ta set.”
As Clover broke the hug and stepped back, her smile had faded, leaving a worried expression in its place. “I apologize for the alarm this must be causing to the rest of the land. We would not have let things fall so far, but we simply cannot devote the ponies to cast a spell as complex as that needed to manage the celestial bodies.”
“We had attempted something to that effect,” Princess Platinum interjected, looking more disheveled and haggard than Smart Cookie had ever seen her. “You have not known terror till you have had half your court staring straight into the sky, devoting all their magic to moving the sun and moon when a flock of decaying pegasi swarms down at you like a foalhood nightmare made flesh.” She shuttered. “After that first attempt, I could not blame anypony who did not wish to try another time.”
Smart Cookie nodded sympathetically as she looked to the sky. While the number of undead still capable of flight was small, she wouldn’t like to allow them any opening to attack her unawares. “How were the casualties?”
Platinum sighed and shook her head. “Not as bad as they could have been, I suppose, but enough to shake the confidence of the ponies.” She pointed to the battlements, directing Smart Cookie’s attention to them. “My personal guard as well as anypony with experience fighting has been set along the wall, but I have had to reinforce them two to one with untrained peasants who have never held a sword or spear before in their lives.” A note of pride colored her voice as she added, “My knights are worth a dozen of those mongrels with our defenses intact, but even their valor will not long hold long against what waits beyond our walls.”
“As you say,” Smart Cookie replied flatly. “Well, we have come here ta aid you in yer defense, so unless yer knights think they can step up their game to be worth maybe, two dozen of the ‘mongrels’…?”
Platinum’s eyes flashed, but before she could retort Clover stepped between the two, a diplomatic smile plastered across her face. “We are of course more than glad to accept your offer of friendship!” Clover looked back at Platinum as the other pony took a deep, calming breath. “You must forgive our strained tempers as it has been a long night.”
“Indeed,” Platinum conceded, “Though from the look of you and yours, we have not been the only ones. I would offer you a bed for the evening, but I fear we have delayed long enough with niceties as is. Pray tell, can we expect still further aid soon or have you come alone?”
Smart Cookie waved to her troops who quickly ran off to reinforce the walls. Following them, she addressed the Princess and Clover, “Soon. We were sent as a vanguard while the tribes assembled their forces for the march.”
“And to allow me to stew while Hurricane drags her hooves, I should not doubt,” Princess Platinum groused. “That helmet headed fanatic will not have given up on her paranoid theories so easily, not even with the lives of every living pony in the balance.” Clover coughed and the Princess scowled. “Oh you know as well as I do that her being right does not mean that her ideas were not paranoid!”
Smart Cookie raised an eyebrow at the odd statement, but chose not the to pursue it, as they had reached the wall and looking out at the vast host of the dead seemed to put all other concerns into a grim new perspective. Instead she reassured, “She will not leave us. Her own soldiers now stand side by side with yours and Commander Hurricane, for her faults, is not disloyal ta those below her.”
Princess Platinum snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh she does indeed put on quite the show of her much vaunted loyalty, but I notice that she sent not one of her advisors or lieutenants to lead her representatives. That is hardly the action of a mare who wishes to prove how unwilling she is to lose what she invests.”
“It is a less than reassuring sign,” Clover added. “I mean, I would hardly have expected her to send anypony too close, but even just a proper representative of her tribe would have been proper.”
“Ah,” Smart Cookie said, feeling suddenly very hot under her steel collar. “There is actually a somewhat humorous story about that very point.” She smiled nervously as the two unicorns turned to look at her. “Ya see-”
“Milady!” Smart Cookie was cut off by a voice from the court yard. Looking down, she saw an armored earth pony with a large hammer strapped to her barding and a large sack tossed across her back, who stood staring up at her with an urgent look upon her face.
“What is it, Berry?” Princess Platinum shouted back, frowning slightly at the interruption.
“Are these the ponies who were sent back by the Chosen One?” the earth pony asked, looking at Smart Cookie.
Smart Cookie nodded and Platinum relayed. “Yes, it would appear that she managed to deliver a message without summoning anything else that is currently trying to kill us. I suppose that would count as some sort of improvement.” She sighed as the earth pony took off at a gallop toward the stairs leading up to where the trio stood.
“I should warn you,” Clover said, “Our blacksmith has been oddly infatuated with the chosen one since she departed the castle. If she has remained with Commander Hurricane or Chancellor Puddinghead, you must simply tell her this and be clear that you can tell her nothing more about it at this time.” Clover looked over the hoard. “I doubt we will have the time for ideal talk.”
“Ah,” Smart Cookie said again, starting to feel slightly uncomfortable. “Ya see there is an amusing coincidence in that humorous story I mentioned to ya before.” Smart Cookie smiled nervously as the unicorn’s eyes once more locked onto her.
“Go on,” Princess Platinum intrigued in a silky voice.
“Well ya see, Commander Hurricane did send her friend Private Pansy to accompany us on our expedition.”
“And she left you on the road?” Clover asked, looking skeptical. “That hardly seems like something she would do.”
Princess Platinum’s eyes narrowed, “I don’t believe that is what Smart Cookie is saying at all,” she said.
“No.” Clover felt sweat form on her brow as the Princess’ gaze seemed to bore into her. “That is to say that, she was with us till we reached the castle. Then she split off to follow the chosen one.”
“The Chosen One?” Clover looked astonished as she quickly looked around the castle battlements. “Is she here? If she came with you then where is she now?” Clover looked puzzled, but the Princess’s eyes suddenly widened.
“That sound!” she gasped. “And that shout! I had thought I had imagined their similarity, but that truly was the Chosen One out there in the woods, firing off her infernal Boom Spell!” Platinum’s eye twitched as two and two came together in her mind. “And Commander Hurricane’s closest friend and advisor is out there with her, in the woods, being hunted by untold numbers of horrific monsters.”
“Well when ya put it that way…” Smart Cookie said slowly. “It does sound a touch less positive than how it sounded like when she said she wanted to be there with her friend.”
“But the Chosen One and this Pansy have ponies with them, correct?” A shaky voice asked from behind Smart Cookie’s back. As she turned she saw the earth pony staring at her with a pale, horrified expression.
“Um, well, not as such,” Smart Cookie offered, feeling color rise to her cheeks. “Not as such, no, aside from one another of course.”
“I am going after them,” the earth pony stated flatly, looking past Smart Cookie at Princess Platinum.
“That’s insane, Berry!” Clover snapped. “There is no way you can get past the army down there; you would be chopped to pieces before your hooves hit the ground!”
Berry shook her head. “Not if the pegasi fly me down. You can’t afford to risk them not being on the wall for long and they couldn’t spot the chosen on from above the trees anyway, but they can drop me and I can find them.”
“That is the most foolish plan I have ever heard,” Clover snorted. “You would be throwing your life away for nothing! You have a child, Berry. Think about what you are proposing.”
“I have,” Berry insisted, looking as determined as ever. “Milady has provided for Berry Pinch better than I ever could before she became Milady’s squire. I trust her to treat her no worse after I am gone. Besides, if Commander Hurricane arrives and we have let her friend die on top of everything, it will hardly be better than if the dead had taken us in the first place.”
Clover fumed, “How dare you take that sort of callous attitude toward your own daughter’s happiness and wellbeing? Not to mention the presumption of just assuming that your lady would enable you to shirk your duties by offering to-”
“Enough!” Princess Platinum bellowed, shocking the others into silence. “Clover, your advice is never unwelcome, but that does not allow you to speak for me. As for you, Berry, you are right. Commander Hurricane will surely seek vengeance if we do not do everything in our power to save her representative of good will and peace.”
Clover and Berry looked at one another as Princess Platinum turned to Smart Cookie. “Now, I have a request of you for the pegasi who accompanied you here.”
The wind whipped though Princess Platinum’s mane, causing it to billow out behind her as she stared down at the ground far below and the multitude of shambling monsters trudging through the marshy ground. The pursuing force, emboldened by their numbers and staggered by their various states of decomposition, had begun to spread out as those less mobile were left behind by their more lively kin. This suited the Princess just fine. Platinum looked back at Clover whose eyes were squeezed tightly shut against the wind. She shook her head and turned her sights back to the ground.
Behind her, Smart Cookie’s own eyes had remained wide and terrified as her back legs dangled freely in the empty air, her forelegs wrapped tightly around those of the pegasi carrying her. “Princess,” the earth pony shouted, her voice barely carrying as a gust of air whipped them from her mouth. “Are you sure this is the only way we could have gone after them?”
“Well it beats walking through that army!” Berry bellowed back, wincing as one of the airborne unicorns fried a ghoulish pegasi that had attempted to assault the strange formation of ponies.
“Oh yes, this is far more pleasant than walking!” Smart Cookie snapped, looking up and away from the nauseating vision of forests seeming small enough to walk though like tall grass.
“Well, had you not sent the chosen one and her companion off to die, perhaps we would not now be in this predicament,” Berry Sledge snarled as she rested a hoof on the handle of her great hammer.
“Oh do shut up!” Princess Platinum demanded, turning her head to look at the bickering ponies. “For the love of magic, would you stop your arguing for just a moment and help me look for them?” The two earth ponies nodded, though they shot one another hard glances, causing Princess Platinum to sigh. “My kingdom for an hour of peace and seclusion.”
On the ground the forces of the dead thinned as more and more monstrosities fell behind the reckless charge of their mad leader. In the distance, just ahead of the swiftest of their pursuers, the Princess could see two ponies galloping as fast as they could, occasional bolts of blue magic lancing out from one of them and sending their pursuers tumbling. “There!” She pointed toward the pair. “Dive my brave sisters! Cry havoc and let us save these idiots of war!”
“Oh no,” Smart Cookie whimpered as the pegasi turned down and dove in formation toward the ground, gaining speed as they raced the army of darkness for its prize. Below, the armored creature that led the evil force turned its head to the sky and bellowed in rage at the small army of armored ponies who had just appeared out of the cloudy air.
“You have got to be kidding me!” it screamed, stamping a hoof in irritation. “Colgate, you cheating moron, you’re not getting away from me that easily! Kill them all!”
At that, Colgate and Private Pansy turned to stare in disbelief as a group of unicorns and earth ponies, being carried by a team of rather tired looking pegasi, landed on the ground just behind them. “What in the world?” Colgate spluttered as Princess Platinum, mane as wild and body covered in silvery armor, strode up to her, sword raised high. Just as she reached Colgate the Princess spun on the spot and held out her blade as at the same time the rest of the ponies moved into formation and modeled her movement, creating a wall of steel and flesh between the approaching hoard and their leader.
“Cut them down while they are scattered and we are strong!” Platinum bellowed. “Give them no time to regroup, but advance!”
“What the hay just happened?” Colgate asked, looking from the armored ponies to Pansy. “What happened to us dying?”
“Change of plans,” Clover snapped as she fell back from the line, her magic creating a barrier overhead to protect them from oncoming missiles. “Your luck seems to outweigh your abilities tenfold.”
“Thanks!” Colgate replied, grinning as she started following behind the wall of ponies. “I have always said it better to be lucky than good.”
“You have?” Pansy asked.
“No, but I am going to start now!” Colgate laughed, shaking her head at her sudden change of luck. “I mean, seriously, how does this terrible day turn around any more?”
From the line an armored earth pony suddenly fell back, turning to face Colgate with a huge smile plastered across her face. “Chosen one!”
“Berry?” Colgate’s mouth dropped as the blacksmith embraced her. “What are you doing here?”
“I had heard of your predicament and wished to assist you!” Berry explained, pulling her bag out in front of her. “And to deliver you what I had promised you before your exile.” She pulled a long metal board from the bag, as well as a length of serrated chain and a strange box.
“That’s… great Berry.” Colgate offered, slightly less enthusiastically.
“Hold still,” the blacksmith chided, taking hold of Colgate’s metal leg and carefully detaching it from its harness. With a deft series of motions, Berry attached the box to Colgate’s leg stump, the board to the box and the chain to the board. Finally she passed a metal tab connected to a string inside of the box to Colgate. “Take this and pull on it and keep your leg raised when you do!”
Colgate gave her a confused nod and yanked on the tab. With a roar of magical energy that made the ponies around her start, the device sprung to life, causing the chain to spin around the board at an incredible speed. “What is this?” Colgate asked, looking at the chain as if hypnotized by it.
“I call it a chain board!” Berry explained. “Try it!” The ponies standing before Colgate moved aside as Berry pushed the reluctant mare forward till she was facing the oncoming dead.
“Me and my big stupid mouth,” Colgate moaned, lifting the chain board out in front of her as a huge, graying stallion charged her.
“Now!” Berry screamed, giving Colgate a hard push toward the stallion. In a second Colgate was pelted by a spray of gore as the chain board sawed thought the monster as if it were made of butter. Berry ducked as both sides halted and stared at the grizzly spectacle. Finally the stallion fell to pieces, leaving Colgate standing perfectly still, covered in blood and bits of flesh. Berry looked out from behind her back and brushed a small amount of skull from Colgate’s flank. “So, how do you feel?”
Somepony helped steady Colgate as she raised her good front leg, wiped the gore from her eyes, and looked from the chain board to the rest of the deities. She smiled. “Groovy.”
“Charge!” somepony bellowed, and with a scream the whole company advanced, crashing into the disorganized dead like an unstoppable wave of metal and flesh. Colgate’s vision was blocked out as the world became a narrow corridor, with armored ponies to both sides and enemies in front. At one moment she thought she saw Berry lunge ahead, hammer shattering a skeletal unicorn into a shower of bones and at another she could have sworn that an enormous, headless earth pony was swallowed up by a pillar of bright purple magic, but for the most part her attention was wholly focused on the whirring chain and the results of its grizzly work.
Then as Colgate wiped the blood from her eyes, everything stopped. In front of her, a solid wall of horribly decayed ponies stood, spears and swords and pitchforks pointed at the living and in front of them. Bloodstained spear in hoof, a lone armored figure pointed its weapon directly at Colgate.
“Enough!” it snarled as the company slowed to a stop, warily watching the dead and their mysterious leader. “I have had it up to here with you, Colgate!” they shouted, stamping a hoof in irritation. “My army will soon have the castle and with it, my book.” The figure tore off its helmet, causing the company to gasp in shock as Colgate’s own mutilated face glared at her from across the battle field with its one remaining eye. “But until I shove this rotting spear through your brain I am not going to be able to enjoy that! So here is the deal.” She turned her head to look at the others. “We outnumber you all two to one and I have reinforcements catching up every second. If you try and fight us, we will kill you all without a doubt.”
“Then come and get us! We will fight you to the end!” somepony challenged before a loud clang signaled somepony else knocking him upside the head.
“Right, as I was saying,” Evil Colgate picked up, “We will kill you all, but there is a chance the chosen one will die at the hoofs of one of my minions… or more likely she will run away while you all die and then I need to chase her down again till some other improbable turn of luck delays the inevitable.” She sighed. “Again. So here is my proposal; I want Colgate and I want the book. After that, I can destroy the world at my own pace. That gives you all time to make peace with your loved ones or try and mount some doomed resistance or whatever.” She waved a hoof dismissively. “Anyway, you get some more time and all you have to do in return is not throw away your lives in a pointless battle and let me fight Colgate one on one, beat her, kill her and then cut off her head and stick it on my spear. Seem fair?”
Colgate felt a sudden sinking sensation as a number of hooves gently rested against her back side and slid her forward and out of the ranks.
“Good luck chosen one!” somepony whispered from her left.
“We know you can do it!” another encouraged from the right.
“Hold up!” Colgate shouted as the ranks closed behind her and she found herself standing in between the two armies. “You all just came to save me! What the hay?”
“Actually we came for Private Pansy,” Smart Cookie offered, holding onto the pegasus who was attempting to fly to Colgate’s side. “But we are all very impressed by your willingness to stand up for others!”
“Fear not, chosen one!” Clover offered. “If you are indeed destined to defeat the evil that has threatened our land, then you’re fated to win this! And if not, then somepony else can come along later and fix your horrible mistakes!”
“I hate all of you!” Colgate screamed as the company took a few steps backward. “Seriously, everypony in this time period sucks!”
“Take heart!” Berry encouraged, jumping up and waving from over the heads of the frontline ponies. “Your darker half is missing an eye and only has a spear. Your victory is all but assured!”
“But she is an un-killable super monster!” Colgate wailed as she turned to see her doppelganger advancing on her, grin spreading across its face. “Aw… horse apples.”
Colgate threw herself to the side, her evil clone’s spear missing her by inches as she attacked. Colgate retreated parallel to her former line as Evil Colgate stalked forward, jabbing and slashing with the spear tip in quick movements, careful to not over-commit or let Colgate get close enough to take a counter attack with her chain board.
“Come on!” Colgate battered away at the spear with her own weapon, but before the chain could do more than scrape the wood, Evil Colgate whipped it away with a smirk. “Stop doing that and just come at me!”
“Oh…” The mutilated mare pretended to think for a moment before grinning. “Nah, I think I am going to just keep doing this-” She darted forward and jabbed Colgate’s hoof, drawing blood. “-until one of us can’t keep going.” She watched Colgate wince as she slowly backed away, blood running in rivulets down her wounded hoof. “After all the running around you have done today I can’t imagine it will be all that long.”
At her vile duplicate’s words, Colgate felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over her. Even just thinking about how long it had been since she had been able to just sit down for ten minutes made her feel faint. The chain board drooped as she felt her body start to slow down. As her thoughts began to drift, Colgate suddenly lurched back as the tip of the spear lanced out to within a hair’s breadth of her right eye.
“Ha! Not done yet?” Evil Colgate slowly flanked Colgate, forcing the tired pony’s back to the army of the dead. “Good. I would hate to make this too quick for you.”
Colgate put on her best brave face and spat at her adversary. “Your over confidence is going to be your downfall- OW!” Colgate’s taunt was cut off as one of her back legs sank into an exceptionally deep patch of swampy ground. As she collapsed backward, Evil Colgate charged ahead, bringing her spear down with a triumphant shout. On instinct, Colgate threw the chain board out in front of herself, knocking the spear away just before it sank into her chest.
As her spear sunk into the muck Evil Colgate growled and tried to yank her weapon free for the killing blow, but before she could Colgate rolled onto her side, driving the chain board’s edge against the spear shaft with a desperate strength. “Get off!” the mutilated mare bellowed, kicking Colgate with a steel-clad hoof. “Stop that! You’re going to break it!”
“Good!” Colgate spat, flinching at the kicks, but not pulling back as the chain tore through the spear in a spray of splinters. With a grunt, Evil Colgate yanked what was left of the weapon free with a crack as the end dissolved under the teeth of the chain board.
“Oh that’s really mature!” the vile duplicate spat, looking at her ruined spear before tossing it aside. “You just have to take the fun out of everything, don’t you?”
“When it involves me dying, yes!” Colgate snapped, slowly crawling to all fours.
“Well then, I guess there is no point in dragging this out, is there?” Evil Colgate walked past Colgate and levitated a sword from one of her undead soldiers. “Now then, let’s finish this once and for all.”
“AGREED!” Colgate bellowed, suddenly leaping forward and driving the chain board into Evil Colgate’s neck. The unnatural night was filled with a terrifying scream as the chain ate though the evil mares neck like a high-powered sander though a stick of butter. Clumps of coagulated blood, fur and bone sprayed out in all directions as Colgate drove the weapon less-than-cleanly through her rival’s neck. As the head fell to the soft earth, Colgate turned away from the body, lowering her weapon as she let out a long, overdue sigh.
“It’s over,” she stated, allowing the magic powering the board to fade.
A tap on her flank caused Colgate to turn back around, only to be hit hard in the face by the decapitated torso. “You know, that was a low blow for a goody little four shoes,” the severed head of Evil Colgate remarked as her body tackled Colgate to the ground, pounding her into the marsh under a flurry of punches. “I mean, cutting off my head when I was disarmed and had my back turned. I’m not so bitter about the whole thing to not admit that I am impressed.”
Colgate raised her hoofs to protect her face from the merciless attack of the headless horse. The chain board had fallen to the side and with each blow, her ability to focus her magic to seize it quickly evaporated as her whole attention was absorbed by the far more pressing concern of not letting her face get beaten into mush. The world seemed to shrink around her till all that existed was herself and the body. Nothing mattered beyond the next strike. Each hit caught on a leg or hoof was a victory, each stunning burst of pain in her face or gut a defeat.
“Seems almost anticlimactic to let things end like this,” the head mused from the sidelines. “Though, I suppose you brought this upon yourself by breaking my spear and not letting me fight you in a proper sword fight.” It clicked its tongue. “And I am going to look ridiculous when I plunge the world into a final apocalyptic darkness, but oh well.” Colgate cried out in pain as a hoof struck home, smashing into her mouth. “I suppose neither of us can have nice things,” the head laughed. “Get it? Because you cut off my head and I broke your precious teeth!” It laughed even harder before glaring at its army. “You know, you can join in anytime you want.” There was a brief pause before a low murmur of awkward laughter rippled through the ranks of the forces of darkness.
Somepony on the other side of the lines coughed.
“Oh forget it,” the head grumbled as it watched the body raise a hoof over the all-but-defeated body of Colgate for a finishing blow. “We will see who’s laughing when this is over.”
A sudden cry rose from the living side as everypony’s attention turned to the sky. Confused, the head looked in the direction and felt its jaw drop the incredibly short distance to the ground as it observed the host of flying, armored ponies flying toward them over the horizon. With sudden panic building somewhere in its lower neck stump, the head hopped around to face its army. “What are you idiots waiting for? Pick me up so I can command you!”
A of hoof grabbed the head from behind and lifted it up, carrying it toward the front of the new line against the oncoming pegasi. “Good!” it shouted. “Now lift me up so that I may better observe our line!” When its carrier ignored the command the head glared up at it. “What, are you deaf?” it demanded before feeling a sinking feeling in the pit of its neck.
Colgate’s face was a ruined mass of cuts, bruises and broken teeth, but her eyes were set with a cold determination. With a horrified shock, it occurred to the head that it had neglected to control its own body after noticing the new threat and so had completely missed its victim shoving the animated corpse off herself as it stood motionless above her. The head, for the first time in its short life, felt truly, truly as stupid as its original copy.
Colgate hobbled forward as the uncertain and still-divided army of the dead was smashed on two sides by the remaining members of her rescue party and the armies of Commander Hurricane, the struggling head still clutched in her hoof. “What are you doing?” the head demanded. “Put me down at once!”
“Whatever you say,” Colgate growled as she reached the edge of a deep pond of murky water.
“Oh you have got to be kidding me!?” the head moaned. “You can’t be serious?” Whatever else it might have added was lost as Colgate dropped the head into the pool of water, watching it disappear with a splash beneath the surface.
Feeling a deep sense of weariness Colgate slowly trudged back to the spot where she had wriggled free from the frozen, headless body and past the armies of the dead which had begun to crumble under the onslaught of the armies of the living without their leader or book to guide them. Revving the chain board’s engine, Colgate turned on the motionless abomination which still stood, poised and waiting for the order to stick one final blow.
Colgate gritted her teeth and raised the chain board above her head. “Now, let’s finish this!”
“And then…?” The green stallion looked at Colgate with a patronizing smile which made Colgate’s color rise.
“And then Commander Hurricane and Princess Platinum’s forces crushed the army attacking us and then went to help Chancellor Puddinghead’s earth ponies who had attacked the army that had been left to defend the castle.” Colgate took a swig from her mug. “I mean, that was pretty much it.”
“And what about that whole thing where Hurricane- Sorry, the Commander Hurricane and the Princess Platinum-” the stallion made little sarcastic gestures with his hoofs as he said the names, “-had some sort of blood feud going on? Or did you forget that part?”
“No,” Colgate snorted, frowning at the purple-maned unicorn. “I was going to get to that! Commander Hurricane was really happy when she saw that Princess Platinum had risked her life to save her friend, Private Pansy, and what with the whole siege thing she basically just said that the Princess had been paid back.”
“And then you came right back here?” The stallion gave a look to the bartender as she brought out Colgate’s fourth drink of the night.
“Well, no.” Colgate shook her head. “I mean, first they offered to make me queen of Equestria, since I sort of saved the world and brought the three tribe’s together and everything. And I knew Berry Sledge wanted me to stay, but…” She finished her drink and pulled the fresh mug to herself, a bit of the liquid inside sloshing out over the rim as she did so. “My place is here.”
“Right,” the stallion agreed, looking utterly unconvinced. “So, if I remember right from the last time you told this story, you… drank a magic potion that Clover the Clever gave you, said the magic words and then fell asleep and woke up near the cabin back in the present time?”
“Well, pretty much.” Colgate nodded. “Though, I mean, I didn’t exactly say every single world exactly or anything, but I mean broad strokes, yeah! That’s what happened.”
The stallion shook his head and looked at the bartender. “Berry, I have no idea how to listen to this crap every week.”
The purple earth pony mare just shrugged, giving the intoxicated Colgate an indulgent smile. “Oh I don’t know. I like it. It’s cute.”
The stallion laughed as he slid off of the bar stool. “Right, and that whole bit about the magical black smith with the familiar name has nothing to do with that, I am sure.”
Berry Punch waved the stallion off as she turned back to Colgate. “I got to say, of all the drunken slobs who come in here spinning tall tales, yours has got to be the longest and most bizarrely consistent one I have ever heard repeated week after week.” She brushed a stray strand of mane from out of Colgate’s face. “Why don’t you write that all down or something? It’s a heck of a story.”
Colgate shook her head. “Nopony would ever believe me. Besides, Derpy and Carrot Top and Lyra and Bonbon deserve better than to have their deaths get laughed off as the ramblings of a madmare.”
Berry sighed and patted Colgate on the shoulder as she went to pour another order. The guards had taken Colgate in for questioning of course. A teacher at Celestia’s school, along with a group of local mares, had gone missing out in the woods one day. Then all of them turned up dead save for Colgate who had come stumbling into town a week later, wrapped in bandages, covered in old scars, missing half her teeth and with one leg replaced with a rusted hunk of metal.
Berry sighed and patted Colgate on the shoulder as she went to pour another order. She remembered what had happened; a group of local mares had gone missing out in the woods one day, and then it was discovered that a teacher from Celestia’s school was missing as well. They’d all turned up dead after awhile, found in what was left of the teacher’s cabin, except for Colgate. The unicorn mare had come stumbling into town a week later, her body wrapped in bandages and covered in old scars, half of her teeth missing and one of her legs replaced with a hunk of rusted metal. She’d been taken in for questioning, of course, but hadn’t been found guilty.
She had been the talk of the town and the center of rumors for weeks after it had all happened. But as her bad story had circulated, dark conspiracies had turned to sad speculations on just how crazy the poor mare had been driven by her experiences.
Berry, for her own part, liked Colgate, eccentric as she was. The other mare had taken to frequenting Berry’s bar almost daily not long after she had been released from custody and it was at the bar, every week, that she told her story.
Passing out the latest order, Berry made her way back to her favorite patron and gave her a warm smile. “You know, he was right about something.”
“What?” Colgate asked, nursing her drink gloomily, something she often resorted to after somepony directly called her out on her story.
“That I find it pretty cute that you put me in it,” Berry said, booping Colgate on the nose. “You know, if you ever want to hang out together without having to drink yourself into an early grave, I do other things besides tend bar.”
Colgate’s cheeks turned bright red as she smiled up at Berry. “Uh, hey! Thank… um thank you a lot Berry, I-”
Colgate was suddenly cut off as the bar’s door slammed open, the figure of a unicorn silhouetted against the afternoon light pouring in from outside. “Lyra?” Somepony gasped as the horrifically decayed mare shuffled into the bar, holding the skull of another unicorn in one hoof.
“Colgate!” the skull hissed. “Do you have any idea how boring spending over a thousand years at the bottomed of a bog is?” Colgate reached down under her seat as Berry backed away from the horrific apparition. “Spoilers for your very immediate future, but the answer is VERY!”
Colgate lifted a box from under her seat, the same box she had carried with her into the bar every day since she had been let go from questioning. From the box she pulled an ancient metal board with a brand new metal chain. “Lyra.” She nodded, fitting the device onto her socket. “Head.” She revved the device and watched as the chain began to spin, scraping rust from the board in a shower of flakes. “I was starting to wonder if you would ever show up.”
“Lyra, kill her!” the skull screeched as the ghoulish remains of Colgate’s friend rushed forward, knocking patrons and tables flying as it hurled itself at its target. Colgate swung back the chain board, ready to meet Lyra’s charge, but was surprised as the deadite suddenly kicked a bar stool at her with deadly precision. The stool hit Colgate hard enough to send her reeling as the deadite pressed its advantage, taking Colgate to the floor.
Colgate felt herself pinned as the rotten thing on top of her purred, “Isn’t this what you always wanted, hmm?” It lowered its head down till its face was mere inches from Colgate’s. “No Bonbon, just me and you, together forever?” The thing that wore Lyra’s face cackled as its mouth opened impossibly wide till it seemed ready to bite off Colgate’s entire head in one bite.
“Hey, new policy!” Berry shouted from somewhere above. There was a crash as fragments of glass and splashes of wine poured down from the suddenly-dazed monster’s head. “No pulse, no service.”
As the deadite shook its head, trying to recover from the shock of the unexpected blow, Colgate wrenched her weaponized leg free and slammed the chain board home into the monster’s side. Berry ducked behind her bar as the entire establishment was suddenly filled with the howling of the monster and the spray of its dark blood.
In less than a minute it was over. The bar and most of its patrons, those who had not had the good sense to flee when the fight began, were now coated in blood, along with the skull which was apoplectic and sputtering incorrect threats. Without ceremony, the gore-drenched Colgate picked up the skull and dumped it in a trashcan, slamming the lid down on it with a bang that drowned out the head’s protests.
“Sure-” Colgate turned back to the bar, where Berry had poked her head out and was surveying the damage with an almost excited smile spreading across her face. “-I could have stayed in the past. I could have even been queen.” She wiped her mouth clean of the blood and downed the only shot left on the bar counter that had not been contaminated. “But in my own way… I am queen.”
Berry suddenly grabbed Colgate and pulled her over the bar counter. “Hail to the queen, baby.” She grinned and kissed Colgate.
